COMMENTARY Ethical dilemmas and the victim’s perspective: Broadening ethics in industrial-organizational psychology Meghan A. Thornton-Lugo† and Marc Cubrich*† The University of Akron *Corresponding author. Email: mmc140@zips.uakron.edu As noted by the focal article (Lefkowitz, 2021), the scholarship of professional ethics in the field of industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology has been largely neglected and warrants further investigation. The taxonomy of paradigmatic forms of ethical dilemmas presented in the focal article represents a substantive advancement in our understanding of the potential dilemmas faced by I-O psychologists. With that said, we contend that a more replete understanding of the types of ethical dilemmas faced in I-O psychology can be achieved by considering a diverse set of perspectives. Unfortunately, the focal article does not adequately achieve this end. First, without assessing the experiences of I-O psychologists-in-training (e.g., students), we limit our concept of ethical dilemmas faced by the broader I-O psychology community to those experienced by the most powerful. Indeed, a question of the difference between ethical issues faced by students today versus more senior I-O psychologists is among the comparative questions raised by the focal article, but student affiliates were nevertheless excluded from the sample. Considering that student affiliates make up 43% of SIOP’s membership (Poeppelman, 2019), inclusion of these individuals would be necessary to adequately understand the dilem- mas faced by I-O psychologists broadly. Second and relatedly, it is argued that the representativeness of the sample is not inherently relevant to the theoretical purpose of the focal article. However, little assessment of demographics related to marginalization, discrimination, and, therefore, potential victimization was conducted. Considering that only 8.9% of respondents in the focal article claimed to be the person targeted or harmed by the ethical dilemma, it seems prudent to consider how a more thorough examination of victimization, the factors that contribute to it, and its influence on ethical perceptions would be of use to I-O psychologists. Moreover, we must consider what value a taxonomy of ethical dilemmas based on perceptions of the powerful poses in an era when broadening our understanding to include the perspective of the victim seems especially valuable. Would not a consideration of victim perspectives potentially reveal other types of ethical dilemmas that the current taxonomy does not provide? Indeed, inci- vility is differentiated from ethical dilemmas in the current taxonomy due to the low likelihood that someone would perceive such behaviors as having an ethical or moral quality. The focal article concedes that although one might “very well experience a dilemma whether to be rude or late, most would not consider it a moral or ethical dilemma” (Lefkowitz, 2021, p. 297). This not only contradicts the research on interpersonal fairness (Bies & Moag, 1986), which sug- gests that individual perceptions of fairness are influenced by interpersonal concerns, but also † These authors contributed equally to this work. © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Industrial and Organizational Psychology (2021), 14, 345–349 doi:10.1017/iop.2021.69 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2021.69 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 173.89.162.104, on 13 Dec 2021 at 14:44:42, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at