Date_en
May 2025

The Effects of Moral Intensity and Moral Disengagement on Rule Violations


subtitle
Occupational Safety in UK‑based Construction Work During the Covid‑19 Pandemic
auteur
Author(s):
author

Claire Mann, Sharon Clarke & Sheena Johnson

référence
Reference:
référence_en

Mann, C., Clarke, S. & Johnson, S. (2025). The Effects of Moral Intensity and Moral Disengagement on Rule Violations: Occupational Safety in UK-based Construction Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic. J Bus Ethics, 198

Our opinion

stars_en
4
opinion

Complying with or disregarding safety rules can be seen as an ethical decision, insofar as such decisions can cause harm, particularly to others. While the ethical implications of corporate safety policies and practices are frequently highlighted, less attention is paid to employees’ individual decisions. Considering rule violations or bypasses through an ethical lens is especially relevant given the complexity of real-life decision-making situations. In particular, employees may face conflicts between contradictory rules. How do they make these morally charged trade-offs? How does the company intervene — or not — in these decisions? The Covid-19 pandemic in the construction sector provided an opportunity to shed light on the importance of the phenomenon of “moral disengagement” by studying the tactics used by employees to free themselves from the moral obligations associated with rules and to justify violations.

How Employees Justify Rule Violations 

Overview

The research was conducted in 2021 and 2022 in the United Kingdom, during the Covid-19 pandemic. During this period, most construction workers—who could not work remotely—were subject to health regulations on construction sites. These rules included wearing masks and maintaining social distancing. They came in addition to the usual workplace safety rules set by legislation and by companies in the sector.

The project was supported by three major companies in the construction industry. The 22 interviewees were employees of these three firms and their subcontractors. They held various positions: operators, foremen, managers, and health and safety officers (7).

The first phase of data collection coincided with an intense phase of the pandemic (lockdowns), while the second phase took place after vaccines became available and restrictions were lighter. This made it possible to study behaviors in two different contexts.

The collected data was analyzed through the lens of two key concepts: moral intensity and moral disengagement

Moral Intensity

Moral intensity is a subjective characteristic of a situation. It refers to the extent to which a problem, act, or event involves a moral issue, judgment, or action. It is fundamentally a matter of perception: for example, a vegan person may see eating as a highly moral issue, whereas most people perceive it primarily in terms of nutrition, taste, cost, or health. The more people perceive situations as morally intense, the more likely they are to behave ethically — even in the workplace. Beyond individual differences in perception, the characteristics that contribute to moral intensity are not endlessly diverse. Although there is ongoing debate on the matter, two dimensions seem particularly important: the magnitude of potential harm involved, and the existence of social consensus. The greater, more serious, and more widespread the harm, the higher the moral intensity. To illustrate the idea of social consensus, let’s return to the topic of food: today, the moral dimension of eating is not the subject of strong consensus, unlike, for instance, pedophilia, which is universally regarded as a profoundly serious moral issue.

Moral Disengagement

Moral disengagement refers to the cognitive tactics individuals use to bypass the internal barriers to behaviors that are normally considered morally unacceptable. When people contemplate actions that are morally questionable, they are confronted with dissonant feelings such as guilt or the fear of blame. To avoid this, they redefine certain aspects of the situation or the act itself in a way that frees them from moral responsibility. For example, they may invoke a moral justification for the act; shift the responsibility to another agent; minimize or deny the negative consequences of the act; or devalue or dehumanize the potential victim(s). The higher the moral intensity of a situation, the more difficult it becomes to morally disengage.

It is this complex interplay between the perception of moral issues, tactics of moral disengagement, and rule compliance or violation that is examined in detail through real-life situations experienced by construction workers during the Covid-19 pandemic. One of the major contributions of this study is to show that this dynamic does not unfold solely at the individual level. Ethical questions are too often seen as purely personal choices, whereas the collective context plays a major role.

 

Our Summary

In general, although some injuries were reported — because certain workers chose to carry out dangerous tasks alone rather than risk potentially contaminating contact — conflicts between workplace safety rules and health regulations were typically resolved in favor of the former. As a result, the decisions made did not lead to the kind of ethical compromises one might expect in situations involving conflicting rules. Instead, moral disengagement tactics were widely used to justify violations of health regulations.

Let’s illustrate these various moral disengagement tactics with a few examples. 



Cognitive Reconstruction

Workers remove their masks while working in a tunnel because, they say, clear communication is essential in such conditions. Or they disregard social distancing rules in order to carry out difficult tasks that could lead to accidents. In these cases, workplace safety is prioritized over health safety. This form of cognitive reconstruction allows them to resolve the conflict between competing rules.



Shifting Responsibility

Foremen treat the absence of masks as simple “forgetfulness”, responding only with friendly reminders. Or they tolerate it because, after all, “no one knows what people did over the weekend”. While snack and beverage dispensers are emptied to prevent gatherings, one employee stocks products and sets up a sales spot around their desk. These violations are morally made possible by shifting responsibility from the individual to the foreman — who usually accepts it — or to the entire group. This normalizes the violation.





Minimizing the Severity of Consequences

Some employees hold conspiracy-like beliefs about the pandemic or vaccines and deny any real danger. Others are fatalistic: “If I’m going to get it, I’ll get it”. These attitudes become more widespread as the crisis evolves and measures are relaxed. As a result, the moral intensity is perceived as nonexistent or minimal. Strongly shared within certain employee groups, these positions minimize the severity of the consequences of violations, or even deny them altogether.



Victim Blaming

Finally, the work culture in the sector tends to view virus victims as responsible for their own fate because they engaged in usual but inappropriate behaviors — for example, socializing together or going to the pub after work, since that is common in the trade. The victims themselves accept this responsibility. Added to this is the fatigue with protective rules as the epidemic drags on. This victim blaming allows those who violate the rules to absolve themselves of moral responsibility.



 

Interestingly, workplace safety has supported these tactics with “good” justifications, as seen in the example of masks hindering clear communication. But more broadly, it is the culture of the sector that has been the matrix for various forms of moral disengagement regarding health rules. This is even more true at the level of subcultures or group cultures, which bring together employees from a site, a company, a nationality, and so on. The strength of social consensus within these work subcultures is such that moral issues — and with them personal responsibilities — almost completely dissolve. The ethical approach thus confirms results well established by social psychology and sociology. 

This approach, focused on moral disengagement, also highlights the importance of coherence and alignment in rules and practices. Inconsistencies are exploited as opportunities to weaken moral stakes and justify rule bending or violations. However, companies do not control this coherence: they only govern the workplace. If workplace rules are stricter than the constraints imposed on everyday life, or if the latter evolve more rapidly, individuals find good reasons to disregard the rules at work. What’s the point of distancing yourself from someone you’ll end up chatting with right after leaving the site?

Faced with the complexity of the processes revealed, companies may feel powerless. The authors’ recommendations suggest two complementary approaches. The first relies on simplifying messages. It involves raising the moral intensity related to the issue through communication, training, etc., while supporting this “dramatization” with simple rules for employees to adapt their behavior. This type of approach will surprise no one. However, due to the complexity of disengagement processes, the key role of local subcultures, and the diversity of concrete situations, such a generalized approach cannot suffice. It is also necessary to empower local actors, particularly frontline supervisors, to handle problems as they arise locally. For example, when subgroups adopt a denial posture about the severity of the stakes (see earlier regarding conspiracy attitudes), the “dramatization” strategy will be ineffective. It is impossible to change this posture in the short term. Only the local manager can know how to best communicate with this subgroup to reach the best possible compromise. Similarly, conflicts between rules, which cannot have a general solution, can be managed locally by frontline supervisors who may foster more satisfactory compromises than outright violations.

 


A Comment by Hervé Laroche, Program coordinator at Foncsi 

Beyond Covid-19 or health-related issues, this research invites reflection on, on the one hand, rule conflicts and their resolution, and on the other hand, the meaning that rules take on in a local context shaped by technical and social particularities. Situations of this kind involve intertwined moral factors. Analytically, different moral dimensions can be identified, but in practice, they are intertwined. Employees’ understanding of these can, depending on circumstances, emphasize different interpretations. This constitutes levers for moral disengagement — a creative and multifaceted process that, through various tactics, can exploit one aspect or another. Therefore, it is difficult to anticipate behaviors: they are constructed locally. The crucial importance of the collective dimension (groups, subcultures, etc.) further complicates matters by introducing a powerful intermediary between the individual and the situation. As a result, it is not possible to reduce this kind of context to a few simple rules that could be controlled by general measures.

 

These questions of arbitration will soon be the subject of a strategic analysis by Foncsi.