The ODA Section invites you to an ODA research seminar where Mathilde Hedegaard Tønnesen will give the following presentation:

Leadership, Responsibility, and Unethical Conduct in Teams: How Decision Structures Shape Displacement and Diffusion of Responsibility Among Leaders and Followers

Abstract
How do formal decision structures shape diffusion and displacement of responsibility in unethical leader-follower collaborations? Across four experiments (N_total = 2,976), we investigate how leadership presence, authority allocation, and structural positioning influence responsibility attribution and coordinated unethical behavior within teams. Leveraging a novel approach to measure responsibility attribution across organizational decision structures, Study 1 shows from an observer perspective that flat structures primarily foster responsibility diffusion, whereas hierarchical structures more often elicit responsibility displacement. Studies 2 and 3 extend these findings to real-time leader-follower interactions. The findings demonstrate that hierarchical structures increase coordinated dishonesty, potentially by enabling greater behavioral coordination while simultaneously attenuating leaders’ and followers’ sense of agency. Study 4 examines how leadership behavior further shapes responsibility attribution, showing that leaders tend to displace responsibility downward, whereas followers frequently diffused responsibility across the team. Importantly, conditions in which leaders encouraged unethical behavior through verbal directives, rather than incentive-based cues, generated the highest levels of unethical collaboration. By integrating theories of moral disengagement with research on formal decision structures, this work advances ethical leadership research by identifying structural mechanisms through which leaders and followers assign moral responsibility. These findings position structural accountability as a central lever for shaping ethical conduct in leader-follower interactions. 

Keywords: moral agency, moral disengagement, leadership, responsibility attribution, collaboration 

Everyone is welcome!