New research finds that moral suspicion from higher-ups' wrongdoing spills down to people lower in an organization, even if they did not work directly under the moral transgressor.

Benoit Monin an associate professor of organizational behavior and of psychology and his co-author Sawaoka noticed that people seemed to suffer more reputational damage when they were associated with an unethical supervisor than with an unethical subordinate, in their study Moral Suspicion Trickles Down published in in Social Psychological and Personality Science on October 16.

The researchers found that participants reported greater moral suspicion toward group members exposed to immoral behavior of higher ranking, compared to lower ranking, group members. And in one study, they found that this moral spillover damaged people's ability to be hired. The vignettes included examples from the financial, scientific, and medical sectors, and the results were similar across all the sectors. For example, they point to the stigmatization that many former employees of Enron have faced since the company's collapse and the cloud of suspicion that surrounds co-authors of academics who were found to be responsible for research fraud such as psychologist Diederik Stapel.

While past psychology research has looked at how people's moral reputations are tarnished by their own moral failings, this paper is one of the few to examine how people's moral reputations can be damaged by others' moral failings. "In order to preserve one's moral reputation," Sawaoka says, "it may not be enough to be ethical yourself; it's also important to surround yourself with ethical co-workers, and particularly to work under ethical management."

Of course, that's easier said than done. To reduce this spillover effect, Sawaoka suggests that when a scandal occurs, the affected organization emphasize the ways in which the moral transgressors are not representative of the organization, but rather the result of personal flaws or values.