The Achieving Personal Gain

As Tenbrunsel and Messick (1999) claim, another type of decision frame used when individuals engage in amoral decision-making processes is the personal frame. If this type of schemata is adopted, the achievement of a personal benefit is going to be the key driver of the decision process. In the academic paper analysed, the personal frames that have been identified can be categorised into five sub-groups: laziness, safety, comfort, self-enhancement and enforcement of moral values. Examples of each sub-group are provided as follows:

Laziness

•  “I’d say “We’re out of Cokes” because I wasn’t interested in going back to the galley.
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  Or I wouldn’t give someone a second glass of water. I didn’t even need to be mad at anyone – I was just lazy […]”;

• “Some flight attendants just say, “We don’t have that.” I don’t think it’s that big deal to make tea, but it does interrupt your routine a little”;
•  “I would say we don’t have any more pillows when I didn’t feel like looking for them”;

Safety

•  “Sometimes I will fib and say that I don’t know where I’m staying when I do.

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Comfort

•  “Sometimes if you’re really hot and the passengers are cold, you’ll say, “I’ll tell the pilots,” or “I just called about that,” but you really didn’t.”

Moral values enforcement

•  “If we have an unaccompanied minor, I’ll tell them we’re not allowed to serve them Cokes. […] I can’t say that to the parents – I can’t tell them what I think of them for giving their kids Coke”;
• “Sometimes people order a special meal, then they see what the regular meal is and they decide they want that.
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  […] I tell them we don’t have any more. My personal feeling is that the passenger can’t just decide which meal they want.”

Self-enhancement

•  “I was more dishonest with peers than with customers. If I was flying with a girl going to law school, I would make up that I went to college.”

In all the above-mentioned cases retrieved from Scott (2003), employees lied to either passengers or their colleagues in order to obtain a personal benefit out of it. Therefore, they overlooked the moral aspects of the decision-process, framing instead their decision as personal. This logic is consistent with Tenbrunsel and Smith-Crowe’s model (2004), who argued that such schemata are part of amoral decision-making processes.