Friday, September 20, 2013

Opportunism

                It’s rare that an executive team that has a lot of influence is largely unregulated, but that’s the case with the Actuarial Science Club. There’s a group of 10 students that plans and runs just about everything that the students participate in outside of class – recruiting season, social events, and networking opportunities to name a few. There’s a faculty member who is technically our sponsor, but he’s very hands off. As a result, there are quite a few opportunities for students to take advantage of circumstances where they have a great deal of power and low chance of repercussions.
               The most obvious opportunity here would be in the money collection process. We collect fees from our club members for numerous things over the course of the year – club dues, fees for events, and club merchandise just to name a few. Because there are 10 of us collecting money from so many people, it would be easy for someone to take the club’s money instead of depositing it. It would also be easy for someone to give their friend a “free pass” by marking down that they’d paid when they hadn’t.
               While I haven’t vetted every single board member, I do know that there are board members who haven’t taken money from the club or given their friends a “free pass”. The person I’m thinking about specifically is or president from the 2012-2013 school year, Jenna. She didn’t take advantage of this opportunity when she held a more junior position in the year prior to her presidency, either. I’d speculate that she didn’t take advantage of the opportunity for multiple reasons. First and foremost, I think, she considered the concept of stealing to be morally wrong. She always tried to uphold a high moral standard, so the thought of stealing from the club would have been completely out of the realm of possibility. I think another reason that she didn’t steal is that she genuinely cared about the club. She personally had benefited from the club quite a bit, so she wouldn’t want to take any resources that would be put toward benefiting others. My last guess would be that she wouldn’t want to take the risk of getting caught and ruining her reputation. The actuarial field is very small, so one amoral act can permanently damage your reputation and have an effect on your career.
               On a very large scale, these do amount to the same thing – she didn’t want to do something that would result in a negative outcome for her. The nature of those negative outcomes are different, though. In the cases where she didn’t want to commit an amoral act and where she wouldn’t want to take resources from a club she cared about, the negative outcome would be a personal feeling of regret. In the case where she didn’t want to ruin her reputation, the negative outcome would be an impact on her dealings with other people and potentially her future earnings. The first is internal, the second is external. Either way, though, I’m glad she made the decision she did to stay honest and not take the opportunity presented to her.

               

3 comments:

  1. There is a bit of contradiction in what you wrote. At first you said it would be easy to get away with it. Later you wrote that she was afraid she might get caught. The only way the two are mutually consistent is if she had an irrational fear of detection, which normally might be a reasonable hypothesis, but is a little harder to understand for somebody studying actuarial science.

    Now let me further analyze this form a cost-benefit point of view. It is not just the detection probability that matters, it is also the size of the gain if not detected. When both the probability and the gain are small, it may be harder to work out the boundary for "rational cheating."

    On the humorous side of this, in Superman III Richard Pryor has a theft scheme were he steals the employee "roundoff" in their paychecks - the half cent or so that no individual actually tracks, but that matters if aggregated over enough employees.

    In this sense, the state of Illinois actually acts opportunistically via faculty. They are on nine month contracts but are paid over 12 months. In the past when interest rates were above zero - this meant that the State rather than the employee got "the float."

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sounds like there were ample opportunities for executive leaders of the club to take advantage of their position. That being said, and people's characters taken into account, I actually think more leaders try to stay away from immoral behavior. I'm part of a campus organization myself and we handle dues as well, but I trust myself as well as my board members to not mishandle dues. To this day, in the three years that I have headed this organization, we have never had a problem. Of course as the years go by and enterprises get larger, there will be people here and there that will want to skirt the rules or engage in opportunistic behavior but I feel overall they will choose not to.

    ReplyDelete
  3. This definitely seems like an extreme case of opportunism at work. Obviously the consequences for stealing and getting caught would be quite severe. It seems as if taking advantage of the situation by stealing the money from the club would definitely not be worth getting caught and potentially losing the position in the club or even worse criminal proceedings. The moral and right thing to do in this case would be to not steal. Leaders of any organization should be upheld to a high moral standard because people see them as an example.

    ReplyDelete