Media Effects on Group Collaboration: An Empirical Examination in an Ethical Decision‐Making Context

Even though it is widely acknowledged that collaboration underlies much of the decision‐making efforts in contemporary organizations, and that organizational groups are increasingly making decisions that have ethical implications, few studies have examined group ethical decision‐making processes and outcomes. In addition, while there is increasing evidence that groups often collaborate/communicate using different mediating technologies, few studies have examined the effect of the characteristics of the media in group ethical decision‐making contexts. Finally, there is a clear paucity of studies that have investigated group decision making pertaining to information technology (IT)‐related ethical dilemmas, an area of rising importance for information systems (IS) and decision science researchers. This article seeks to address the gaps described above through an experimental study where groups collaborating either in a face‐to‐face context or in a computer‐mediated context (using NetMeeting or Wiki) were required to make a decision with respect to a scenario with an IT‐related ethical dilemma. Results indicate that media characteristics (e.g., anonymity, immediacy of feedback, parallelism) do not have an effect on whether groups make ethical (or unethical) decisions. However, several media characteristics were found to play a significant role on downstream variables, such as the quality of a follow‐up task (i.e., creation of a decision justification document), and overall process satisfaction of the group members.     

Ethical frameworks and ethical behavior: A survey of business students

This study investigated the efficacy of collegiate attempts to help students cope with ethical dilemmas. Data were collected from 674 business students on their ethical frameworks and ethical behaviors. Modest support was found for the relationship between the frameworks used for decision making and the choices made when confronted with an ethical dilemma. Furthermore, it was found that ethical frameworks were generally resistant to change over time while behavioral choices did change over time.     

Moral Utility Theory: Understanding the motivation to behave (un)ethically

Moral Utility Theory provides an integrative framework for understanding the motivational basis of ethical decision making by modeling it as a process of subjective expected utility (SEU) maximization. The SEUs of ethical and unethical behavioral options are proposed to be assessed intuitively during goal pursuit, with unethical conduct emerging when the expected benefits of moral transgressions outweigh the expected costs. A key insight of the model is that any factors that increase the value of a goal—including incentives, framings, and mindsets—can motivate misbehavior by increasing the SEU of unethical conduct. Although Moral Utility Theory emphasizes the automatic and habitual nature of most SEU appraisals, it also describes a mechanism for initiating the deliberative moral reasoning process: the experience of moral uncertainty. Moral uncertainty is proposed to occur when the SEUs of ethical and unethical behaviors are similar in magnitude, thereby activating the behavioral inhibition system and motivating the allocation of attentional resources toward the decision process. This framework bridges the gap between affective and cognitive perspectives on ethical decision making by identifying automatic evaluations as a central driver of moral decisions while also specifying when and how moral reasoning processes are initiated. By combining dual-process models of morality with well-validated principles from the science of motivation, Moral Utility Theory provides theoretical parsimony and formal modeling potential to the study of ethical decision making. The framework also suggests practical strategies—from employee selection and training to goal setting and compensation systems—for encouraging ethical behavior in organizations.     

13 Ethical Decision Making: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going

Abstract

Research on ethical decision making, or behavioral ethics, in organizations has developed from a small niche area to a burgeoning stand‐alone field, one that has gained not only in number of articles written but in the legitimacy of the topic and the field. Our review motivated us to first try and summarize the field, not by comparing it to existing theoretical paradigms, but rather by observing what the data were telling us. We present our summary in the form of a model of ethical decision making and a typology that distinguishes intentionality of actions from ethicality of actions. After presenting this summary of the data, we critically review the research in this area, noting those areas which offer substantial insight and those that do not. In looking to the future and how the field can enhance the former and mitigate the latter, we identify several areas in which meaningful progress can be made, including defining what is “ethical”, revisiting unsubstantiated assumptions, focusing on the processes of ethical decision making, fixing methodological issues, and disentangling the outcomes of ethical decisions.     

企业决策的伦理评价模型

首先评述了西方两种典型的企业决策伦理评价方式——基于伦理原则的评价方式以及布来查德和皮尔的三个伦理核查项目,然后指出了分层次伦理评价的必要性及西方企业决策伦理评价方式在这方面的不足,构建了由可接受层次和满意层次组成的二层次企业决策伦理评价模型,并提出了相应的准则。     

Perceived Acceptability of Risk Analysis as a Decision-Making Approach

Three methods for making a consumer product safety decision were evaluated on scales relating to their perceived acceptability, logical soundness, completeness, and sensitivity to moral and ethical concerns. Two of the methods were formalized techniques: cost-benefit analysis and risk analysis. The third method involved abiding by standard industry practices. Other factors in the decision-making context were also varied. The results indicated that formalized techniques were preferred over the standard practices method. Within the formalized methods, cost-benefit analysis was judged less acceptable than a comparable method that did not involve making explicit value tradeoffs. All methods were judged more acceptable when they led to improved product safety. Knowledge of consequences did not exert direct effect on judgments, though it did interact significantly with other variables. The results are discussed in terms of judgmental processes that people apply when evaluating decision methods.     

The effects of authentic leadership on followers' ethical decision-making in the face of temptation: An experimental study

The present research investigates the impact of authentic leadership on followers' morality, operationalized as ethical decision-making, in the face of temptation. This experiment finds that authentic leadership and temptation interacted to affect individuals' ethical decision-making. Specifically, authentic leadership significantly inhibited individuals' from making unethical decisions in the face of temptation, whereas followers of neutral or less authentic leaders were more likely to succumb to temptation. Authentic leadership did not have a significant impact on ethical decision-making when temptation was absent. Further, results showed a significant moderated-mediated effect whereby the interactive effect of authentic leadership and temptation on individuals' guilt appraisal was mediated through the nature of the ethical decision. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Situational impacts on leader ethical decision-making

Leader ethical decision-making has received a great deal of attention in the academic literature. Most research examining ethical leadership has focused on the leader characteristics and subordinate outcomes associated with ethical leadership, but research examining the situational variables influencing leader ethical decision-making is limited. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine a number of situational variables that may influence leader ethical decision-making. This study examined the impacts of performance pressure, interpersonal conflict, the leader's decision-making autonomy, the type of ethical issue at hand, and the level of authority of the other person involved in the interaction. The results indicated that when making a decision in response to a superior (as opposed to a peer or subordinate), leaders make worse decisions. Additionally, a number of interactions of the other variables negatively impacted leaders' ethical decision-making. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

针对灰色营销进行道德培训的实验效果

本文以道德培训为操纵变量,以工商管理专业的大学生为实验对象,研究了灰色营销的道德培训对人们灰色营销道德判断和行为倾向的影响.结果发现:第一,针对灰色营销的短期道德培训能够显著改进被培训者针对灰色营销的道义论评价和目的论评价,但是不能降低其灰色营销行为倾向;第二,尽管针对灰色营销的短期道德培训能够改进人们针对灰色营销的道义论评价和目的论评价,并且后者对人们的灰色营销行为倾向也有显著影响,但是它们不能中介短期道德培训对灰色营销行为倾向的影响.本文最后讨论了研究结果的理论贡献与实际应用.     

The effect of authentic transformational leadership on follower and group ethics

We propose a theoretical model to examine how authentic transformational leadership influences follower individual and group ethical decision making. We investigate how follower moral identity and moral emotions mediate the effect of authentic transformational leadership on follower authentic moral action. Furthermore, we explore how authentic transformational leadership develops group ethical climate, which in turn contributes to enhancing group ethics and to developing follower moral identity and moral emotions. Future research and practical implications are discussed.     

Domestic Violence Spillover into the Workplace: An Examination of the Difference between Legal and Ethical Requirements

Domestic violence is a growing societal concern that often spills over into the workplace. However, employers are not recognizing the spillover of domestic violence as a workplace issue. This is problematic considering the serious financial, legal, and ethical consequences for organizations. We analyzed six cases involving domestic violence that were litigated under specific legal bases: Violence Against Women Act, discrimination laws including Title VII, Family and Medical Leave Act, Americans with Disabilities Act, Social Security Disability, Occupational Safety and Health Act, and associated state and municipal ordinances. We chose cases that illustrate the problems of companies meeting the legal standards but not necessarily reaching ethical expectations. Our approach is congruent with the perspective that both legal and ethical analyses should be used in organizational decision making. We suggest for future research the analysis of additional litigated cases, other ethical perspectives, and additional sources of data. In addition, we suggest that companies who are striving for corporate social responsibility should integrate the ethical treatment of domestic violence victims.     

Ethics, Decision Analysis, and Public Risk

In any analysis of a decision problem involving public risks, ethical implications are introduced. In some cases, these ethical implications may be introduced simply because an analysis is being done. Additional ethical implications may be inherently part of the methodology being utilized or introduced into the specific analysis of the decision problem. In this paper, we investigate where and how ethical implications enter when using the methodology of decision analysis to examine problems involving public risks. We conclude that the methodology of decision analysis is sufficiently robust to allow for numerous different ethical viewpoints to be accounted for in any specific analysis. Stated alternatively, decision analyses of public risks can be conducted in a manner consistent with utilitarianism, deontological theories, libertarianism, egalitarianism, and so forth. However, any specific analysis has embedded within it numerous ethical implications. This suggests that the careful ethical scrutiny of analyses involving the methodology of decision analysis should be placed on the specific application and not on the methodology per se or on the fact that an analysis is undertaken.     

Formal Infrastructure and Ethical Decision Making: An Empirical Investigation and Implications for Supply Management

Building on Rest's (1986) conceptual model of ethical decision making, we derive and empirically test a model that links an organization's formal ethical infrastructure to individuals’ moral awareness of ethical situations, moral judgment, and moral intention. We contribute to the literature by shedding light on the importance of a multifaceted formal ethical infrastructure—consisting of formal communication, recurrent communication, formal surveillance, and formal sanctions—as a crucial antecedent of moral awareness. In so doing, we discern how these four elements of a formal ethical infrastructure combine to collectively influence moral awareness based on a second‐order factor structure using structural equation modeling. We test our model based on survey data from 805 respondents with significant work experience across three separate ethical scenarios. Our results across the three scenarios provide overall support for our model. We found that a second‐order factor structure for the formal ethical infrastructure explains the variance among the four infrastructure elements and that a multifaceted formal ethical infrastructure significantly increases moral awareness. Our results further suggest a strong positive effect of moral awareness on moral judgment, which in turn was found to have a positive impact on moral intention. These results were substantiated when taking several individual and contextual control variables into account, such as gender, age, religiosity, work satisfaction, and a de facto ethical climate. Implications for theory, practice, and supply management are discussed.     

Ethical leadership supports safety voice by increasing risk perception and reducing ethical ambiguity: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

Misconduct by business and political leaders during the pandemic is feared to have impacted people's adherence to protective measures that would help to safeguard against the spread of COVID-19. Addressing this concern, this article theorizes and tests a model linking ethical leadership with workplace risk communication—a practice referred to as ‘safety voice’ in the research literature. Our study, conducted with 511 employees from UK companies, revealed that ethical leadership is positively associated with greater intention to engage in safety voice regarding COVID-19. We also find that this association is mediated by relations with the perceived health risk of COVID-19 and ambiguity about ethical decision making in the workplace. These findings therefore underscore the importance of good ethical conduct by leaders for ensuring that health and safety risks are well understood and communicated effectively by organizational members particularly during crises. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our study and highlight further opportunities for future research to address the ethical dimensions of leadership, risk management, and organizational risk communication.     

The Blind Spot in Risk Ethics: Managing Natural Hazards

Many risk scholars recognize the importance of including ethical considerations in risk management. Risk ethics can provide in‐depth ethical analysis so that ethical considerations can be part of risk‐related decisions, rather than an afterthought to those decisions. In this article, I present a brief sketch of the field of risk ethics. I argue that risk ethics has a bias toward technological hazards, thereby overlooking the risks that stem from natural and semi‐natural hazards. In order to make a contribution to the field of risk research, risks ethics should broaden its scope to include natural and semi‐natural hazards and develop normative distribution criteria that can support decision making on such hazards.     

The 2008 Wall Street Crash: A Failed Organizational Response to Complexity

In the period since the 2008 Wall Street crash, little consensus has emerged on its causes or actions to prevent a recurrence. Our capability for rational decision making was overwhelmed. Viewing the entire financial system as a huge, richly interconnected organization suggests that its structure and associated management practices are suited for a far simpler environment. An organization that is large relative to its environment and sufficiently complex to require the coordination of specialized expertise cannot function by enabling decision makers to respond only to local demands. The resulting inability to recognize critical interdependencies and the nature of their risk makes periodic catastrophic failure likely. Specifically, compartmentalization of information, influence, and reward creates a myopic decision environment in which individual decision makers are unlikely to make effective or ethical decisions. Useful criteria for evaluating solutions can be suggested by considering the interaction of two factors: limited human information processing capability and the effect of motivation on information processing. Taken together, they suggest that human information processing is both limited and opportunistic. We cannot process all information available and the information selected for processing narrows to that needed to achieve salient rewards. Because of this, the organization's reward practices and their effect on motivation are a critical variable. Large financial rewards contingent upon short term, local, simplistic measures inevitably narrow the focus of decision maker's attention to a small part of the system. In contrast, dominant intrinsic motivation is rooted in awareness of, and responsibility for, broader outcomes. Each type of motivation differs in its requirements for sharing of information, influence, and reward. These, in turn, determine the adaptability of the organization to complexity and change. While this has significant ethical implications, its logic rests on the limitations of human information processing and motivation. Aligning human motivation and information flow to the demands of a complex, turbulent financial environment is the challenge we must meet to prevent further cataclysms.     

Stakeholder Actions and Their Impact on the Organizational Cultures of Two Tobacco Companies

We link the behaviors of executives and lawyers in two tobacco companies, in defending their tobacco products to the actions of stakeholders (e.g., the U.S. Government and Congress, medical researchers, consumers, public‐health organizations, tobacco‐control advocates, and insiders who have spoken out). Included in our analysis, which is based on publicly available documents spanning over a period of almost six decades, are critical incidents in which moral disengagement tactics were applied in the decision‐making process. We infer that the disengagement tactics applied by tobacco decision makers are indicative of what Schein and other organizational scientists describe as organizational culture. We equate the critical incidents to the espoused beliefs and values and underlying assumptions which comprise organizational culture and explain that the cultures of these two tobacco companies are not consistent with the stakeholder theory of management. We conclude that the critical incidents we analyze were immoral and the representatives were indeed accountable for these behaviors. From an organizational change perspective, we discuss how analyzing these critical incidents can serve to assess the extent to which an organizational culture is ethical. Furthermore, these critical incidents can be fed back to organizational decision makers and can then be used to initiate organizational changes.     

Ambiguous Allure: The Value–Pragmatics Model of Ethical Decision Making

Research in organizational ethics emphasizes those dispositional factors that are expected to foster positive ethical behavior. We seek to contribute to this literature by including personal values that are in contention with moral outcomes. Specifically, we combine the values of hedonism and power with benevolence and universalism. Our underlying premise of this value–pragmatics model is that nonmoral, as well as moral, dispositional characteristics simultaneously influence ethical decision making. We further contribute to the existing research by investigating how these contending values interact with situational factors, such as performance rewards and punishments for unethical conduct. We administer an experiment to subjects (N = 177) and analyze their decisions regarding the likelihood they would act unethically. Results indicate that both morally relevant and nonmoral variables have direct effects on these decisions, and that nonmoral as well as moral values interact with situational factors to significantly influence decisions. Implications for practice and research are discussed.     

In Defense of a Utilitarian Business Ethic

In this article, I suggest and support a utilitarian approach to business ethics. Utilitarianism is already widely used as a business ethic approach, although it is not well developed in the literature. Utilitarianism provides a guiding framework of decision making rooted in social benefit which helps direct business toward more ethical behavior. It is the basis for much of our discussion regarding the failures of Enron, Worldcom, and even the subprime mess and Wall Street Meltdown. In short, the negative social consequences are constantly referred to as proof of the wrongness of these actions and events, and the positive social consequences of bailouts and other plans are used as ethical support for those plans to right the wrongs. I believe the main cause of the neglect of the utilitarian approach is because of misguided criticisms. Here, I defend utilitarianism as a basis for business ethics against many criticisms found in the business ethics literature, showing that a business ethics approach relying on John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism supports principles like justice, is not biased against the minority, and is more reasonable than other views such as a Kantian view when dealing with workers and making other decisions in business. I also explain utilitarian moral motivation and use satisficing theory to attempt to defend utilitarian business ethics from questions raised regarding utilitarian calculus.     

Intelligence gathering for decision making

Empirical studies of decision making seldom consider the intelligence gathering activities required for decision making. In an attempt to fill this void, this study set out to identify and assess some of the key steps in gathering intelligence, considering the difficulty of the decision and available resources. The study found performance gapping and premising to be crucial activities and explored how each is carried out. A variety of premising and gapping tactics were uncovered, with some having better success than others. These tactics were found to influence the search approach selected to uncover alternatives and the success of the resulting decision. The best results were noted when search efforts are guided by needs documented with a quantitative performance gap; and when formal search or negotiation is used to identify alternatives. These findings hold for decisions that have high and low difficulty and for those with high and low resource support. The implications of these findings for decision makers and decision making are discussed.