The NGO Halo Effect: How Moral Goodness can Explain Unethical Behavior

Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are perceived to be morally good, yet NGOs engage in multiple types of unethical behaviors. Research explains NGO’s unethical behavior despite their moral goodness. We conceptualize how NGO unethical behavior can be explained because of their moral goodness. We propose that the three characteristics inherent to NGOs—the nondistribution constraint, being private, and voluntary—can explain why NGOs can be perceived to be morally good. We apply the construct of the halo effect and focus on the perception of people in NGOs to conceptualize how they can overestimate the goodness of their NGO’s mission, morality, and people, including themselves. We define this as the NGO halo effect. We propose that the NGO halo effect can relate to unethical behavior by people in NGOs by three moral mechanisms—moral justification, moral superiority, and moral naivety. We discuss our model’s implications for theory building and future research.