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.     

Business Ethics through Meditation: The Ethical ‘I,’ the Ethical ‘You,’ the Ethical ‘We’⋆

Environmentalists have been criticizing the ethics of business people concerning the natural environment. Citing Thomas Berry as an example, this paper attempts to bring his three abstract values (presence, subjectivity, and communion) closer to the understanding of the average business person through meditation. The introduction describes business ethics in terms of relationships to the individual, or the ethical ‘I’ to the natural environment, or the ethical ‘You’ and to interpersonal relationships, or the ethical ‘We.’ Meditation is also defined, according to Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1986), as a meditative experience together with a period of reflection and small-group discussion. More specifically, meditation takes on three forms. Part one describes nondiscursive meditation in the context of what Berry means by presence. The problem addressed here is how to meet and cultivate the ethical ‘I.’ Part two will deal with semidiscursive meditation in the context of what Berry means by subjectivity, or the ethical ‘I’ in relation to the earth. The earth then becomes the ethical ‘You.’ Part three will deal with Berry's definition of communion, or the ethical ‘We.’ The practice of discursive meditation gradually leads to what Thomas Berry calls a renewed ‘visionary experience.’ The article concludes with a redefinition of business ethics in terms of our relationships to ourselves, as human persons, to the earth as our living environment, and to each other as members of the human community. The redefinition of our relationships through meditation is ‘visionary,’ or a new ‘paradigm,’ that, hopefully, will lead to the renewed ethical practice that other environmentalists are also advocating, for example, Arnold Berleant. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Factors of Employees’ Effective Voice in Corporate Goverance*

Traditionally, corporate governance has focused on the problem of crafting mechanisms to align the interests of owners and managers. The key characteristic has been to minimize the potential for managers to act in their own self-interest at the expense of shareholders. The purpose of this paper is to focus on employees as stakeholders in the governance process. We argue that creating an environment where employees have help in behaving ethically, in the course of their work, is the first step in encouraging them to voice observations of wrongdoing. Seven groups of professionals in the accounting and insurance fields were surveyed during a 10-year period and asked to indicate the extent to which 14 items were helpful in dealing with ethical challenges. Over 2700 responses were analyzed. The findings indicate that professionals think that their organizational culture and policy for voice was more helpful in dealing with ethical dilemmas than was their professional association. *Presented at the 2004 European Academy of Management Conference in St. Andrews, Scotland     

Re-imagining ethical leadership as leadership for the greater good

As Western nations slowly emerge from the recent global recession, there is demand among citizens for authorities to practice, and be seen to practice, ethical leadership. Although these conditions have been favourable for research into ethical leadership, extant research privileges westernized perspectives on ethical leadership and is largely silent on the meaning and practice of ethical leadership in the context of the ‘big’ ethical questions. In consequence, most research into ethical leadership, although well meaning, offers little guidance about how to imagine and implement sustainable, ethical solutions to systemic problems. In this research note, we outline a proposal to reimagine ethical leadership as leadership for the greater good and identify three avenues of research into leadership for the greater good that compliment existing critical perspectives on ethical leadership.     

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.     

A dynamic and cyclical model of bounded ethicality

We introduce a new model of bounded ethicality which helps explain three persistent puzzles of ethical behavior: when moral awareness is or is not present, when ethical behavior is more or less consistent with past behavior, and when blind spots obscure our ethical failures. The original conception of bounded ethicality (Chugh, Banaji, & Bazerman, 2005) described the systematic psychological constraints on ethical behavior and has contributed to our field's understanding of the phenomena of everyday, “ordinary” unethical behavior. In this more detailed model, we delineate these systematic processes and mechanisms and show how concepts of automaticity, self-view, and self-threat play critical roles in our ethical decision-making. The model describes distinct, asymmetric patterns of (un)ethical behavior and pinpoints the contingency which determines which pattern is more likely to unfold, including when we will trend to more or less automaticity and more or less ethical behavior. Our model integrates and synthesizes many of the key models and findings in recent behavioral ethics research into a single, overarching model of ethical decision-making, offering an anchor for new questions and a new realm of study.     

中国情景下消费者的伦理购买意向研究——基于TPB视角

本文运用大样本问卷调研法,基于TPB视角重点分析消费者的伦理购买决策机制,旨在考察中国情景下影响消费者伦理购买意向的深层次因素。研究结果发现,行为态度、主观规范与感知行为控制会显著影响消费者的伦理购买行为意向,其中主观规范是购买意向最有影响的预测变量,表明中国情景下消费者在进行伦理购买决策时更倾向于遵从社会规范的影响;进一步感知行为控制不仅直接显著作用于伦理购买意向,还通过行为态度对伦理购买意向产生间接的重要影响,表明在中国情景下如何真正提高消费者伦理购物时的感知行为控制程度是企业实施伦理营销时面临的关键性问题。总体而言,本文结果表明,修正后的计划行为理论对中国情景下消费者的伦理购买意向能够进行有效地解释与预测,说明计划行为理论具有良好的跨文化适应性。最后,本文为中国企业伦理营销战略的实施提供重要建议。     

Discerning Possibilities for Action: A Typology of Approaches to Moral Imagination

The existing literature on moral imagination proposes that actors can best respond to ethical dilemmas by tailoring their actions to the practical demands of the situation. It has done little to develop this insight, however. To address this gap, I used institutional theory to identify six ideal type approaches to moral imagination. I proposed that in addressing ethical dilemmas, the morally imaginative actor takes account of two situational factors: first, the social construction of the unmet ethical claim or obligation which constitutes the ethical dilemma, and in particular whether or not it is broadly perceived to be legitimate; and second, its own degree of power. The framework presented represents the first attempt to systematically enumerate approaches to moral imagination and identify their boundary conditions.     

The Ethics of Management Research: An Exploratory Content Analysis

Management academics have tended to rely on ethics codes developed by social researchers in related fields to inform their research practice. The point of this paper is to question whether this remains a viable approach in the current climate that is characterized by a significant increase in ethical regulation across the social sciences. We suggest that management researchers face ethical issues of a different nature to those most frequently confronted by other social science researchers, and argue for more explicit acknowledgement of contextual factors involved in management research. An exploratory analysis of the content of ethics codes formulated by nine social scientific associations is undertaken to identify the main ethical principles they cover and to analyse their underlying ethical tone. Drawing attention to the principle of reciprocity, which is found in very few codes, we suggest that an ethics code could be used to formulate new ways of thinking about management research relationships. Despite the risk that ethics codes may encourage instrumental compliance with minimal ethical obligations, we suggest they also have the potential to reflect a more aspirational agenda. The development of an ethics code for management research should therefore be seen as a potentially worthwhile project.     

International Evidence on the Determinants of Organizational Ethical Vulnerability

This paper proposes a model to explain what makes organizations ethically vulnerable. Drawing upon legitimacy, institutional, agency and individual moral reasoning theories we consider three sets of explanatory factors and examine their association with organizational ethical vulnerability. The three sets comprise external institutional context, internal corporate governance mechanisms and organizational ethical infrastructure. We combine these three sets of factors and develop an analytical framework for classifying ethical issues and propose a new model of organizational ethical vulnerability. We test our model on a sample of 253 firms that were involved in ethical misconduct and compare them with a matched sample of the same number of firms from 28 different countries. The results suggest that weak regulatory environment and internal corporate governance, combined with profitability warnings or losses in the preceding year, increase organizational ethical vulnerability. We find counterintuitive evidence suggesting that firms’ involvement in bribery and corruption prevention training programmes is positively associated with the likelihood of ethical vulnerability. By synthesizing insights about individual and corporate behaviour from multiple theories, this study extends existing analytical literature on business ethics. Our findings have implications for firms’ external regulatory settings, corporate governance mechanisms and organizational ethical infrastructure.     

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.     

Effects of ethical leadership on emotional exhaustion in high moral intensity situations

Emotional exhaustion is a threat to standard operations, particularly in organizations in which physical safety is at risk. High moral intensity is inherent in such organizations due to the magnitude of consequences associated with ethical/unethical conduct. The authors proposed a psychological process in which ethical leadership affects emotional exhaustion directly and indirectly through team cohesion. As military operational contexts typically are (or frequently have the potential to become) high moral intensity situations, the authors tested their model among 338 military personnel deployed in combat zones. They found that: (1) team cohesion partially mediated the relationship between ethical leadership and emotional exhaustion, and (2) this psychological process of direct and indirect effects of ethical leadership did not hold among individuals approaching the low end of conscientiousness.     

Stakeholder Theory: The State of the Art

Abstract

For the last 30 years a growing number of scholars and practitioners have been experimenting with concepts and models that facilitate our understanding of the complexities of today’s business challenges. Among these, “stakeholder theory” or “stakeholder thinking” has emerged as a new narrative to understand and remedy three interconnected business problems—the problem of understanding how value is created and traded, the problem of connecting ethics and capitalism, and the problem of helping managers think about management such that the first two problems are addressed. In this article, we review the major uses and adaptations of stakeholder theory across a broad array of disciplines such as business ethics, corporate strategy, finance, accounting, management, and marketing. We also evaluate and suggest future directions in which research on stakeholder theory can continue to provide useful insights into the practice of sustainable and ethical value creation.     

Rethinking the Concept of Sustainability

The role of business ethics in developing more sustainable societies is crucial, but we first have to review the concept of sustainability itself and its ethical roots. The objective of this work is to rethink the current concept of sustainability by providing it with a sound universalistic ethical rationale. We propose that ethics is the key by which disputes and conflicts among the economic, social, and environmental domains can and ought to be resolved. This work argues that if we fail to recognize the essential ethical grounding of sustainability, or if we take it for granted, then sustainability can easily lose its way and can end up unjustified.     

Using Exemplary Business Practices to Identify Buddhist and Confucian Ethical Value Systems1

Initially, a brief history of Buddhism and Confucianism describes for the reader a framework developed to determine right versus wrong action and to guide followers of these religions to do the right thing in social or business practice. In addition, this article uncovers exemplary business practices grounded in Buddhist and Confucian ethical values system and practiced in the global business arena and uses these discoveries to describe an application of Buddhist and Confucian ethical values systems. The result is the recognition that these ethical values systems have an honorable and moral place in global business practice.     

Can ethical leadership inhibit workplace bullying across East and West: Exploring cross-cultural interactional justice as a mediating mechanism

While workplace bullying is recognised as a serious issue for management concern around the world, the literature on approaches to prevent and manage it in international settings is sparse. This paper advances knowledge on managing workplace bullying by reporting an investigation of how and why ethical leadership may be an effective management style to address this issue across cultures. It draws on Social Learning and Social Exchange Theories to conceptualise interactional justice as a possible mediating mechanism by which workplace bullying can be reduced in the presence of ethical leadership.The researcher surveyed 636 employees working in an equivalent job context in Australia (N = 306) and Pakistan (N = 330) to determine the cross-cultural effectiveness of ethical leadership-based framing. Through the examination of direct and indirect effects (via interactional justice) of ethical leadership on workplace bullying, the findings indicated that employee exposure to such behaviour is significantly reduced because ethical leaders foster justice at work. This study has implications for improving international management practice in regard to workplace bullying.     

A business version of the prisoner’s dilemma: A teaching technique

The “prisoner’s dilemma” is an archetypal choice dilemma widely used for teaching and research in the social sciences. A version of the prisoner’s dilemma which set the problem in an ordinary business context was used as a pedagogic instrument with graduate business students, fully employed and aspiring to upward mobility, and nurses—both male and female—employed at various supervisory levels. The site was a college in metropolitan Detroit. The method engages students in verbal expression, explanation, and justification of their choices and thus departs from mainstream research which treats the prisoner’s dilemma mainly in mathematical terms, usually based upon experiments requiring many iterative choices. Also, whereas the prisoner’s dilemma places the subjects in the frame of mind of being prisoners, this version is of choice-making by free people, with the additional unspecified choice available of not to play the game. Replication outcomes were similar enough to support tentative generalization, although statistical analysis was not significant because of the small number of cases. Results suggest that the method may be useful to managers in their analysis of ethical choice situations and development of alternate scenarios. Vivid lessons regarding the ethical dimensions of business behavior can be learned from the use of the prisoner’s dilemma.     

Can a leader be seen as too ethical? The curvilinear effects of ethical leadership

Ethical leadership predicts important organizational outcomes such as decreased deviant and increased organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). We argued that due to the distinct nature of these two types of employee behaviors, ethical leadership decreases deviance in a linear manner (i.e., more ethical leadership leading to less deviance), but we expected ethical leadership to reveal a curvilinear relationship with respect to OCB. Specifically, we expected that, at lower levels, ethical leadership promotes OCB. However, at high levels, ethical leadership should lead to a decrease in these behaviors. We also examined a mechanism that explains this curvilinear pattern, that is, followers' perceptions of moral reproach. Our predictions were supported in three organizational field studies and an experiment. These findings offer a better understanding of the processes that underlie the workings of ethical leadership. They also imply a dilemma for organizations in which they face the choice between limiting deviant employee behavior and promoting OCB.