BR!TON B!TS
Faculty Earn International Recognition
Baker’s Research Sheds Light on Unethical Workplace Behavior By Leanne Smith Excerpted from MLive, April 18, 2012 The findings of a research study published by an Albion College professor may help employers tell if job candidates are predisposed to unethical behavior at work. Vicki Baker, economics and management professor, worked with colleagues from the London Business School, Cornell University, the University of Michigan, and Pennsylvania State University on the project. . . . She thinks this kind of research would have been beneficial for [companies that have discovered employees engaged in unethical and illegal acts]. “All you have to do is watch the nightly news and realize the individuals doing the ‘perp walks’ 6 | Io Triumphe!
Lia Jensen-Abbott rehearses at Carnegie Hall.
knew what they were doing was wrong, but their self-interest at the end of the day trumped moral and ethical behavior,” she said. . . . The study uses eight criteria to measure a person’s tendency to use different justifications to make bad behavior acceptable. They include lying to protect friends or playing dirty to achieve noble ends, making an illegal act seem less harmful when compared to another, placing blame on an authority figure, telling small lies if no one is hurt, and not being responsible for their actions because others are committing the same unethical act. “You can put people in situations that could trigger these responses, and the people who are predisposed to have them will have them,” Baker said. Baker believes testing this on job candidates could help employers make good hires, and that training workers to identify situations that could lead to unethical acts could help them from acting on them. “I don’t see how this is any different than doing a background check,” Baker said. The study has been published in the journal Personnel Psychology. Baker is now using the results from the research in teaching her classes on human resource management.
D. LAWRENCE PHOTO
By Jake Weber Alumni and friends reveled in the outstanding talent of Albion’s piano faculty, as David Abbott and Lia Jensen-Abbott performed a Carnegie Hall recital in February. A number of Albion residents traveled to New York City for the concert in Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall, joining area alumni and New York residents looking for an evening of piano music. The recital was part of David Abbott’s sabbatical activity, an “extension of the international concerts I gave last year in China, Switzerland, and France,” he said. “Carnegie is one of the premier halls in the country, if not the world, for classical music, and it was wonderful performing there.” Lia Jensen-Abbott played “Das Jahr” (“The Year”) by Fannie MendelssohnHensel, a virtuoso piece attempted by few pianists. Abbott performed works by Mendelssohn contemporaries Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann.
D. ABBOTT PHOTO
Pianists Put Practiced Hands to Carnegie Hall Recital
Geoff Cocks with his latest book.
Cocks Authors Book on Illness in Nazi Germany By Bobby Lee Historians have held to the assumption that Nazi Germany built a society where individualism was stamped out because everyone in the “master race” was subordinated to the collective “racial community.” While the racial community was a reality, history professor Geoff Cocks argues that individuals still looked out for their own material interests and that this was exhibited most significantly in the way Germans were concerned about their health. Cocks assembled numerous first-person accounts—diaries, works of literature, and archival documents from Europe, the United States, and Israel—to complete his new book, The State of Health: Illness in Nazi Germany. The book, published by the