Value-Based Self-Regulation

When responding to a crisis rooted in individual transgressions, regulatory authorities — ranging from police officers to the leaders of major corporations and members of Congress — all tend to draw reflexively upon tools of coercion to compel compliance. This involves emphasizing surveillance and monitoring, aiming to catch bad actors, and the use of models of personal accountability and responsibility to judge and punish transgressors. They do this despite existing empirical evidence from past crises that such efforts, while effective in certain circumstances and with some people, are a generally poor model of regulation. There are, I will suggest, better ways to manage conduct — in particular the actions of employees in work settings.

A focus on surveillance and punishment fits with an emphasis on the goal of compliance, and the belief that people follow rules because they do not want to be sanctioned. This model has been found by researchers to influence behavior effectively, in situations within which it is realistic to monitor and sanction people’s actions. For example, if companies can monitor employee computer usage, they can potentially use that capacity to sanction effectively the use of computers for personal tasks.