Organizational failures often cause significant harm to employees, the organization itself, and the environment. Investigations of failures consistently highlight how key employees behaved in (perhaps unintentionally) unethical ways that de-prioritized safety, such as investing fewer resources in safety (vs. other priorities) over time. Drawing on these investigations, we suggest a previously underexplored theme could explain why organizational failures persist and why employees did not "see" the potential for their behaviors to cause harm to others: Employees were distanced from where the harm eventually occurred, either in terms of space (e.g., being located miles away from the job site) or time (e.g., making decisions that would not have impacts for months or years). We use construal level theory to investigate how the way employees construe where work occurs-defined as work context construal-influences perceptions of harm and the ethical framing of risk-mitigating behaviors. We hypothesize that high-level (abstract) work context construals (vs. low-level, concrete ones) reduce perceptions of potential harm which, in turn, leads to framing risk-mitigating behaviors as less of an ethical obligation. Six studies-a correlational survey of aviation employees (Study 1), field experiments with offshore drilling employees (Study 2A) and health care workers (Study 2B), a preregistered experiment with nurses (Study 3), and two supplemental studies (Studies 4A/B)-support our hypotheses. We discuss implications of this research for understanding organizational failures, particularly in a world where technology increasingly enables employees to monitor complex and high-risk work occurring many miles away, or on the other side of the world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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眼不见心不烦：高层解释如何减少风险缓解行为的道德框架。


组织失败常常会对员工、组织本身和环境造成重大损害。对失败的调查始终强调关键员工如何以（可能是无意的）不道德的方式行事，从而降低了安全的优先级，例如随着时间的推移，在安全方面投入的资源越来越少（相对于其他优先事项）。根据这些调查，我们建议一个先前未充分探索的主题可以解释为什么组织失败持续存在，以及为什么员工没有“看到”他们的行为对他人造成伤害的可能性：员工与最终发生伤害的地方保持距离，无论是在以下方面：空间（例如，距离工作地点数英里）或时间（例如，做出数月或数年不会产生影响的决策）。我们使用解释水平理论来调查员工解释工作地点（定义为工作环境解释）的方式如何影响对伤害的看法和风险缓解行为的道德框架。我们假设，高水平（抽象）的工作环境解释（相对于低水平的具体工作环境解释）会减少对潜在伤害的认知，进而导致将降低风险的行为视为较少的道德义务。六项研究——针对航空员工的相关调查（研究 1）、针对海上钻井员工（研究 2A）和医疗保健工作者的现场实验（研究 2B）、针对护士的预先注册实验（研究 3）以及两项补充研究（研究 4A） /B)-支持我们的假设。我们讨论了这项研究对于理解组织失败的影响，特别是在技术越来越多地使员工能够监控远方或世界另一端发生的复杂和高风险工作的世界中。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。