Every man is, in a certain sense, unconsciously a worse man when he is in society than when acting alone….Any large company of wholly admirable persons has the morality and intelligence of an unwieldy, stupid, and violent animal. The bigger the organization, the more unavoidable is its immorality and blind stupidity….Society, by automatically stressing all the collective qualities in its individual representatives, puts a premium on mediocrity, on everything that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way. Individuality will inevitably be driven to the wall (Jung 1959, 240).

The idea that groups diminish the moral agency of individuals is an alarming one. Does this mean that nations are less moral than small groups of individuals or individuals themselves? Depending on our perspective of history we may agree with Niebuhr and Jung. My own experience and those of my clients and students support both Niebuhr and Jung’s assertions regarding the coercive nature of groups and the resultant moral failings of the group.

The pressure to conform in business organizations is enormous. As Howard Schwartz writes in Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay (1990), the organization’s processes appear to define moral value for its employees and the organization seems to exist in a moral world of its own (Schwartz 1990, 3). My own research supports this view. Many with whom I have spoken or interviewed say “I try not to rock the boat,” or, “you’ve got to play by the rules,” or, “you cannot fight the system.” Senior executives, although less inclined to acknowledge the extent to which they conform to the expectation of their peers or their superiors will readily admit they will only challenge the system if they have a chance of winning. Being ethical, therefore, becomes subordinated to “winning” – whatever that may mean.

If we consider the corporate scandals and the behaviors of some of the executives, we cannot but agree that group pressure to conform effectively silences many. How else would executives have gotten away with their shenanigans for years and years? Can one fool all of the people all of the time? I don’t think so! So why did people not speak up? When people fail to challenge the system or fear whistle blowing they have good reason – group pressure is intense and the price is very, very high.

The Paradoxes of Group Life

Organizations are communities that at one level represent a large group and at other levels represent an aggregation of smaller groups. Every person in the group carries with her certain group identity memberships, for example race, gender, age, that are not volitional, as well as certain memberships that involve some choice, e.g. profession or function. Interaction among members consists of intra-group or inter-group conversations. These conversations can either positively assist in the achievement of the mission or goal of the organization or can, as more often than not, lead to “stuckness,” “group paralysis,” infighting or other divisive behaviors.

In this article I only raise some of the complicated dynamics that occur in groups that affect the moral behavior of its members. Besides the coercive pressure that arises from the struggle for power mentioned earlier, the paradoxical nature of group life provides sources for all kinds of conflict. Some of these sources include the need to unify the talents of different people in order to achieve a specific outcome; the ambivalence of individuals to be “part” of the group yet “apart”; the desire to be separate and connected; the tensions between disclosure, trust and intimacy; the confusions between authority and appropriate dependency; and of course the fear of and desire for power.

The paradoxes inherent in group life place all kinds of burdens on the individual. Ethics education should include discussions on how the paradoxes and sources of conflict impact both the group and individuals’ behavior. Ethics education should also provide individuals with the actual experience of their reactions to group behavior especially from a moral perspective. An obvious example is the paradox around the desire to be connected, yet not lose one’s individuality and moral autonomy to the group. This inner conflict is clearly the whistleblower’s dilemma. Once you whistleblow you become the outsider and therefore lose connection. If you do not whistleblow you remain an insider but at the price of losing your moral autonomy. It is not surprising that so few people whistleblow. The desire to remain connected is so strong. Many people choose remaining connected over leading an integrated personal life. Ethics education should help people find their threshold on this important issue.

Regression as Part of Group Life

Some people appear to intellectually regress when in a group situation. This means they revert to a less mature pattern of feeling or behavior reminiscent of earlier stages of mental life. For some simply the experience of being part of a group triggers emotions that evoke more primitive responses. Several explanations are offered for this phenomenon. Group situations evoke feelings of anxiety, loss of control, or a sense of overwhelm.

Wilfred R. Bion, a psychologist and one of the founding members of the Tavistock Institute, studied group behavior for well over thirty years. He argued that regression in groups is significant and associated with the earliest phases of mental life. He explains that, “The belief that the group exists, as distinct from an aggregate of individuals, is an essential part of this regression, as are also the characteristics with which the supposed group is endowed by the individual.” (Bion 1961, 142). The regression the individual experiences stems from a loss of her individual distinctiveness that is lost in the fantasy of the existence of an entity over and beyond its individual members (Ibid.). A consequence of this regression is that the power that individuals impute to a group then serves to overwhelm them (Smith 1987, 127). Another dynamic of regression is that some people create all kinds of fantasies about what the group can do for them and by doing so diminish their own sense of potency and agency (128).

Freud, Bion and many others have written and hypothesized a great deal about the positive and negative aspects of regression. I do not plan to delve into the details here. I raise the issue of regression purely to mark it as yet another factor in group life that influences individual and group morality. Why? Because when we regress to less mature levels of emotional response it is no surprise that our moral behavior falls short of our ethical ideal. (That inner war again!) Ethics education should in some way address this phenomenon so as to raise awareness of its existence.

Splitting, Projection and Scapegoating

I referred to the phenomenon of splitting in my earlier discussion of the shadow. Splitting occurs when we disown some undesired parts of ourselves; maybe that part we know has evil tendencies. In order to maintain a sense of psychological equilibrium, we project that disowned part of ourselves onto something outside of ourselves, typically another person or group. In this way someone else takes on the characteristics of the self that the self unconsciously wants to dispose of or disown. Many of the dynamics operative in groups and organizations may be understood in terms of splitting and projection. One of the key consequences of splitting in groups is that certain individuals or subgroups can end up carrying the “baggage” for others. The projection of the shadow at both the individual and the group level becomes the alien out there instead of the group member’s own inner problem. The “alien” out there unsurprisingly is made into the scapegoat who is then persecuted, banished or eliminated in the futile attempt to eradicate those disowned parts. Until each individual deals with her “baggage” or disowned evil she will be destined to create new aliens indefinitely.

Another aspect of the splitting-projection dynamic is role specialization in group life. Role specialization occurs when a person takes on the projected material from several or all group members. We can all think of people we know who appear to always play the same role in a group situation. There is the pacifier, the emotional one, the devil’s advocate, the clown, the challenger, the cheerleader, the idealist, and the pragmatist, to name a few. As individuals, we typically take on the role that suits our disposition. The power of roles in a group is that when a person playing a role acts, it is as though everyone has acted, because the part each member has projected onto that person has been given expression (Smith 1987, 71). Ethics education should assist students in experiencing the roles they typically take on and how this can lead to a loss of moral autonomy.


(Reprinted with permission of author.)