For millennia, societies have worked to separate the sphere of the legal from that of the
ethical. To understand this, it might be helpful to look at the mediating role of religion.
In Christian doctrine, for example, social relations emphasize the need to clearly
separate the spheres of government (that which “belongs to Caesar”) from the spheres
of spirituality (that which “belongs to God”). Other religions and philosophies have
tended to be somewhat less clear on how distinct this separation should be. For
example, Confucianism (really more of a secular system of ethics than a religion) saw
in the virtues of the emperor and public officials the ultimate model for everyone’s
behavior, and proposed that social relations generally mirror the relationships that
ought to be established between rulers and the ruled. Hinduism, as revealed in one of
the Veda hymns, reserves to members of the Kshatriya caste all military and governance
duties. Islam, too, conflates the public and private spheres negating the separation of
legal and religious duties and rulers, as, for instance, when discussing Islamic finance
and banking (see Chapters 2 and 5).
With time, however, the doctrines and practices of many of these faiths have increasingly
begun to separate the ethical and religious domains from the legal one, the exception
being Muslim countries that continue to adhere to the Islamic legal-and-religious regulation
known as the sharia. (It should be noted that some Western philosophers see this
lack of separation of the legal and the ethical/religious in Islamic countries as transitory,
with the expectation that Muslim societies will eventually move towards separating both
spheres. Of course, many people in Islamic cultures disagree strongly with this assessment,
sensing that this hypothetical evolution may be an attempt to interfere with a
fundamental tenant of the Islamic faith and way of life.)
The major practical implication of this separation of the ethical and the legal is that
only the most fundamental parameters of human behavior (e.g., major crimes against
society) are mandated by the law and oftentimes punished, while the ethical is often
seen as being largely self- or group-regulating and largely excluded from direct government
intervention (e.g., freedom of religion). For this dichotomy to work in actual
practice, however, few contradictions can exist between the mandates of the law and of
ethics, and this is clearly not always the case.
Now we come to an interesting question: What should people (including managers)
do, then, when confronted with a conflict between their ethical beliefs on the one hand,
and local laws and regulations on the other? When all reasonable efforts to reconcile
these conflicting forces fail, research shows that, in most cultures, precedence is most
370 MANAGEMENT ACROSS CULTURE S
often given to the ethical over the legal.13 That is, people will follow their conscience
before they follow the law. This obviously does not suggest that doing so will be easy. In
many cases, following one’s moral conscience risks the penalties that breaking the law
entails. Even so, most cultures most of the time reinforce the importance of doing what
is right over doing what is legal. Indeed, this is how many local heroes are born.
Moreover, many companies encourage their employees to adhere to this doctrine.
For example, in-house training programs at Motorola advise their global managers
to check out whether the consequences of applying the law in various countries may
violate basic principles of human rights or environmental protection prior to taking
action.14 Motorola’s reasoning seems to be attractive to many people, yet it assumes
implicitly that instances of conflict between ethical and legal prescriptions will take
place only in foreign land, not inside the US. Far less training in this area is provided to
many of its local managers.
Thus, people frequently become more apprehensive when what is at stake is the law
of their home country than that of a foreign nation. For example, business travelers to
Iran will often lie to Iranian authorities about ever having visited Israel, since this would
automatically prohibit their entry. But when these same travelers are asked how they
feel about similarly violating the immigration laws of their own country, their responses
frequently become much more nuanced and they typically show a clear reluctance to
break the law. The question for global managers, then, is when and where to place
personal convictions above the law. Not an easy question, as we will see below.