Moral character: What it is and what it does

Moral character can be conceptualized as an individual's disposition to think, feel, and behave in an ethical versus unethical manner, or as the subset of individual differences relevant to morality. This essay provides an organizing framework for understanding moral character and its relationship to ethical and unethical work behaviors. We present a tripartite model for understanding moral character, with the idea that there are motivational, ability, and identity elements. The motivational element is consideration of others – referring to a disposition toward considering the needs and interests of others, and how one's own actions affect other people. The ability element is self-regulation – referring to a disposition toward regulating one's behavior effectively, specifically with reference to behaviors that have positive short-term consequences but negative long-term consequences for oneself or others. The identity element is moral identity—referring to a disposition toward valuing morality and wanting to view oneself as a moral person. After unpacking what moral character is, we turn our attention to what moral character does, with a focus on how it influences unethical behavior, situation selection, and situation creation. Our research indicates that the impact of moral character on work outcomes is significant and consequential, with important implications for research and practice in organizational behavior.     

Repairing and Enhancing Trust: Approaches to Reducing Organizational Trust Deficits

Abstract

Organizational scholars have long touted the myriad benefits of trust for organizational functioning and performance. Recent surveys, however, document pervasive deficits in such trust. This article addresses the important topic of reducing these deficits. Our attack on this problem is two pronged. First, we examine approaches to repairing damaged trust within organizational settings. Specifically, we assess the state of organizational theory and knowledge regarding effective approaches to trust repair after internal or external events have weakened or damaged trust in an organization. We define what is meant by trust repair, review the most common ways that trust is broken, and then explore the three major approaches that have received the most attention in trust‐repair research. We then address the question of how trust, once repaired, can be enhanced and made more durable and stable. Specifically, we examine theory and evidence regarding the antecedent conditions that support the development and maintenance of what we term presumptive trust among organizational members. We conclude the article with some recommendations of fruitful directions for future research.     

Moral humility: In life and at work

If behavioral ethics research from the past two decades has taught us nothing else, it has made it abundantly clear that humans are morally fallible. Indeed, there are everyday examples—in the workplace and beyond—of people who unwittingly violate their personal moral values, finding numerous ways to rationalize and justify otherwise morally objectionable behavior. In this article, we argue that acknowledging one’s own moral fallibility and developing moral humility can be an influential step in helping bridge the gap between a person’s values and behaviors. Specifically, we define and make the case for moral humility as a fundamental virtue that can help people better avoid unethical behavior and enable virtuous behavior. Specifically, we explore the potential effects of having low (insufficient), high (optimal), and extremely high (excessive) levels of moral humility on multiple outcomes at the individual, interpersonal, and organizational levels. Our hope is to encourage future research on this important but underexamined construct.     

Improving Risk Management: From Lame Excuses to Principled Practice

The three classic pillars of risk analysis are risk assessment (how big is the risk and how sure can we be?), risk management (what shall we do about it?), and risk communication (what shall we say about it, to whom, when, and how?). We propose two complements as important parts of these three bases: risk attribution (who or what addressable conditions actually caused an accident or loss?) and learning from experience about risk reduction (what works, and how well?). Failures in complex systems usually evoke blame, often with insufficient attention to root causes of failure, including some aspects of the situation, design decisions, or social norms and culture. Focusing on blame, however, can inhibit effective learning, instead eliciting excuses to deflect attention and perceived culpability. Productive understanding of what went wrong, and how to do better, thus requires moving past recrimination and excuses. This article identifies common blame‐shifting “lame excuses” for poor risk management. These generally contribute little to effective improvements and may leave real risks and preventable causes unaddressed. We propose principles from risk and decision sciences and organizational design to improve results. These start with organizational leadership. More specifically, they include: deliberate testing and learning—especially from near‐misses and accident precursors; careful causal analysis of accidents; risk quantification; candid expression of uncertainties about costs and benefits of risk‐reduction options; optimization of tradeoffs between gathering additional information and immediate action; promotion of safety culture; and mindful allocation of people, responsibilities, and resources to reduce risks. We propose that these principles provide sound foundations for improving successful risk management.     

Ethically adrift: How others pull our moral compass from true North,and how we can fix it

This chapter focuses on the social nature of morality. Using the metaphor of the moral compass to describe individuals’ inner sense of right and wrong, we offer a framework that identifies social reasons why our moral compasses can come under others’ control, leading even good people to cross ethical boundaries. Departing from prior work on how individuals’ cognitive limitations explain unethical behavior, we focus on socio-psychological processes that facilitate moral neglect, moral justification, and immoral action, all of which undermine moral behavior. In addition, we describe organizational factors that exacerbate the detrimental effects of each facilitator. We conclude by advising organizational scholars to take a more integrative approach to developing and evaluating theory about unethical behavior and by suggesting further study of interventions that might disempower these social triggers of unethical behavior, allowing us to regain control of our moral compasses.

A solitary organism has no need for moral rules, nor does a creature living among others without mutual dependency. (Høgh-Oleson, 2010, p. 3).

     

Intersectionality: Connecting experiences of gender with race at work

In recent years, research from various disciplines, including social psychology, sociology, economics, gender studies, and organizational behavior, has illuminated the importance of considering the various ways in which multiple social categories intersect to shape outcomes for women in the workplace. However, these findings are scattered across disciplines, making it difficult for organizational scholars to leverage this knowledge in the advancement of gender research. The purpose of this review is to assemble these findings to capture how gender and race, when considered in tandem, can generate new understandings about women of different racial groups and their experiences in the workplace. We first provide a review of both historic and contemporary interpretations of the intersectionality concept. Next, using an intersectional framework, we review key findings on the distinct stereotypes ascribed to Black, Asian, and White women, and compare and contrast the differential impact of these stereotypes on hiring and leadership for these subgroups of women. Building from these stereotypes, we further review research that explores the different job roles that Black, Asian, and White women occupy, specifically focusing on the impact of occupational segregation, organizational support, and the motherhood penalty. Finally, we examine how the frequency, emotional toll, and legal implications of sexual harassment can vary for women of differing races. Through this review, we bring attention to the pitfalls of studying women as a monolithic category and call for organizational scholars to consider the role of intersectionality in shaping workplace outcomes.     

Freeing organizational behavior from inhibitory constraints

Many organizational policies and practices are based on the view that people's behavior needs to be inhibited to protect against their selfish basic nature. Indeed, a fundamental assumption of theories ranging from social exchange to economic models of organizational behavior is that individuals are primarily oriented to gain good outcomes for themselves. This chapter describes a program of research that raises serious questions about these ideas by showing that disinhibition—prompted by reminding people of times when they behaved without worrying about what others thought—can often lead to more helping behavior, decisions for the greater good in response to dilemma problems, and greater rejection of self-advantageous unfairness. These findings suggest that most people are fundamentally pro-social, interested in securing good outcomes for both themselves and others. This pro-social attitude manifests itself more readily in actual behavior and attitudes when the person in question is freed from some of his or her inhibition. These findings have implications for how one might enhance the full potential of employees in organizations, stimulate helping and creative behavior in teams, improve decision making in organizations, and how we should understand reactions to organizational change.     

Ranking of the Most Prolific Authors,Universities, and Organizations in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management

ABSTRACT

Over the years, reviews in behavior analysis have sought to identify the most prolific researchers and institutions. The goal of these reviews was to offer one resource for behavior analysts to identify experts in behavior analysis and quality graduate programs. However, most of these reviews omitted the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management (JOBM), making the results less relevant to those who work in organizational behavior management. The purpose of this review was to extend previous findings and identify the most published researchers, academic institutions, and organizations in JOBM since its inception. Furthermore, we calculated the citation rate (per year, per article) for each of the top 20 most published authors. The results, implications, and opportunities for further analysis are discussed.     

History in Organization and Management Theory: More Than Meets the Eye

Abstract

There has been a growing debate about the role of history in management research with several authors making suggestions on how to bring the two (back) together and others even highlighting the need for a “historic turn”. What we argue in this paper is that, while history was indeed sidelined by the scientization of management since the late 1950s, it started to make a comeback from the 1980s onwards and is increasingly employed in a number of research programs. We stress that the crucial question for management scholars engaging with history (or wanting to do so) is how it relates to theory. First of all, we present a systematic overview of the way history has been used—both at the micro (organizational) and macro-levels of analysis—distinguishing between what we refer to as “history to theory” and “history in theory”. In the former, we consider those research programs, such as (neo-)institutionalism, where history serves as evidence to develop, modify or test theories. In the case of “history in theory” we identify research programs where history or the past are part of the theoretical model itself as a driver or moderator, with “imprinting” as a prime example. Second, we also identify a growing number of studies that go further by displaying what we call “historical cognizance” in the sense of incorporating period effects or historical contingencies into their theorizing efforts. Finally, drawing on our broad overview, we make more specific suggestions for increasing the visibility and influence of history in organization and management theory.     

The Professional,the Personal,and the Ideal Worker: Pressures and Objectives Shaping the Boundary between Life Domains

Abstract

Both scholarly literature and popular accounts suggest that modern organizational practices have moved toward encouraging employees to “integrate” or blur the boundary between their personal and professional domains, for example, through self-disclosure at work, company-sponsored social activities or providing on-site child care. Concurrently, an ideology underlying U.S. professional norms discourages integration practices such as referencing non-work roles during workplace interactions, expressing emotions in the workplace, and/or displaying non-work-related items in workspaces. In this review, we posit that these two norms firmly coexist because they differentially serve two objectives corresponding to the parallel bodies of research we examine: one addressing boundary management as a tool for handling role responsibilities, and the other considering boundary management as a tool for shaping workplace identity and relationships. Specifically, we posit that segmenting personal and professional domains facilitates the management of role responsibilities, whereas integration is more beneficial for managing workplace identity and relationships. Furthermore, both objectives serve the “ideal worker” imperative of work primacy. We identify key contingencies that help us to further understand existing research findings, and prompt future research directions informing theories for understanding the attractiveness and efficacy of different personal–professional boundary management strategies for both organizations and individuals.     

The War of the Woods: Facilitators and Impediments of Organizational Learning Processes

This study examines unfolding organizational learning processes at MacMillan Bloedel, a company which, after years of resisting stakeholder pressures for change, disengaged from the field’s dominant paradigm and developed a new solution. We elaborate the Crossan, Lane and White multi–level framework of organizational learning processes, finding support for the four feedforward learning processes they identified (intuiting, interpreting, integrating and institutionalizing), and adding two action–based learning processes: ‘attending’ and ‘experimenting’. We introduce the concept of a ‘legitimacy trap’ to describe an organization’s over–reliance on institutionalized knowledge when external challenges arise. The trapped organization rejects external challenges of its legitimacy when it perceives the sources of those challenges to be illegitimate. Feedforward learning is blocked as the organization escalates its commitment to its institutionalized interpretations and actions. Taking a grounded theory approach, we discuss how individuals attend to new stimuli and engage in intuiting about them, how groups interpret, experiment with and integrate new solutions, and how the firm validates and institutionalizes the successful solution. Facilitators and impediments of each of these learning processes are identified. Our additions to the model recognize the importance of context in organizational learning processes, and suggest how power may impact organizational learning.     

Job insecurity,perceived employability and targets' and perpetrators' experiences of workplace bullying

Abstract

We aimed to investigate (1) the association between job insecurity and workplace bullying from the perspective of both targets and perpetrators and (2) perceived employability as a moderator of these relationships. We argue that job insecurity is associated with social or interpersonal strain as in the case of workplace bullying. Furthermore, workers who feel that they have alternative opportunities for employment may find it easier to cope with insecurity. Stated differently, we aimed to investigate whether the relationship between job insecurity and workplace bullying depended on the level of perceived employability. Hypotheses were tested among 693 workers who participated in a survey on the quality of working life. They were employed at establishments of two Belgian organizations from the textile industry (N=189) and financial services (N=505). We found that that job insecurity was associated with targets' and perpetrators' reports of workplace bullying. The interaction between job insecurity and perceived employability did not contribute to targets' reports of workplace bullying. However, it was related to perpetrators' reports of workplace bullying. Interestingly, the relationship between job insecurity and workplace bullying was stronger under the condition of high versus low employability. This hints at the idea that there could be a “dark side” to employability.     

Organizational Memory: From Expectations Memory to Procedural Memory

Organizational memory is not just the stock of knowledge about how to do things, but also of expectations of organizational members vis‐à‐vis each other and the organization as a whole. The central argument of this paper is that this second type of organizational memory –organizational expectations memory– is a necessary precondition for successfully creating and maintaining organizational procedural memory, which is at the basis of organizational performance. If members of organizations have fewer expectations of being rewarded beyond what is stipulated in formal contracts, these individuals are less likely to risk investing in collective tacit and firm‐specific knowledge resources and more likely to focus on building individual and mobile knowledge resources that have value outside the boundaries of the organization. A case study of latent organizations in the Dutch film industry is presented to support the central argument and suggests further avenues of research, in particular concerning the effects of labour mobility on organizational expectations memory.     

Leadership’s Role in Process Safety: An Understanding of Behavioral Science Among Managers and Executives Is Needed

ABSTRACT

A recent prevalence of high visibility catastrophic events has garnered increased attention to process safety issues. While the use of Behavior-Based Safety interventions demonstrate a reduction in workplace injuries by targeting employee behavior, we believe that process safety requires a greater focus on the behavior of leaders (e.g., creating and executing strategy). One effective method to begin targeting leader behavior for the improvement of process safety is to teach leaders about the principles of behavior, including ways by which the science may be applied within their own organizational models.     

Past,Present and Future Research on Multiple Identities: Toward an Intrapersonal Network Approach

Abstract

Psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers have long recognized that people have multiple identities—based on attributes such as organizational membership, profession, gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and family role(s)—and that these multiple identities shape people's actions in organizations. The current organizational literature on multiple identities, however, is sparse and scattered and has yet to fully capture this foundational idea. I review and organize the literature on multiple identities into five different theoretical perspectives: social psychological; microsociological; psychodynamic and developmental; critical; and intersectional. I then propose a way to take research on multiple identities forward using an intrapersonal identity network approach. Moving to an identity network approach offers two advantages: first, it enables scholars to consider more than two identities simultaneously, and second, it helps scholars examine relationships among identities in greater detail. This is important because preliminary evidence suggests that multiple identities shape important outcomes in organizations, such as individual stress and well-being, intergroup conflict, performance, and change. By providing a way to investigate patterns of relationships among multiple identities, the identity network approach can help scholars deepen their understanding of the consequences of multiple identities in organizations and spark novel research questions in the organizational literature.     

An organizational climate regarding ethics: the outcome of leader values and the practices that reflect them

In this article, we argue that the organizational climate regarding ethics — the shared perception of what is ethically correct behavior and how ethical issues should be handled within an organization — is an outgrowth of the personal values and motives of organizational founders and other early organizational leaders. We begin by arguing that one common label for the climate regarding ethics construct — “ethical climate” — is inappropriate. We also argue that climate regarding ethics has an impact on organizational outcomes, including organizational outcomes that do not have explicit ethical components. We propose that this impact largely occurs through the mediating mechanisms of organizational cohesion and morale. We conclude by discussing the variety of antecedents and outcomes related to climate regarding ethics.     

Learner Engagement: A New Perspective for Enhancing Our Understanding of Learner Motivation and Workplace Learning

Abstract

Organizations invest millions of dollars in workplace learning programs to develop human capital for competitive advantage. The effectiveness of workplace learning programs is directly linked to learner motivation. However, we contend that our current understanding of learner motivation and workplace learning is limited by the tendency to conduct research based on the traditional instructional system design model and the limited adoption of organizational behavior theories to guide such research. We propose that studying workforce learning from a psychological engagement perspective is necessary to gain a better understanding of learner motivation and subsequent knowledge and skill acquisition. We review studies of learning methods and contextual factors that likely influence learner engagement. We propose a research agenda focusing on six directions for future research.     

Bricks without clay: On urban myths in occupational health psychology

Abstract

There is a lack of intricate research into the relationships between work performance and other variables. This study examined the causal relationship between work, non-work stressors, and work performance. Using longitudinal multi-group data from three groups—university staff, trainee nurses, and part-time employees (overall N=244)—structural equation modelling was employed to explore one-way and reverse competing models. The results produced a good fitting model with one-way causal paths from work-related and non-work stressors (time 1) to job performance (time 2). Nested model comparison analysis provided further evidence to support this best fitting model, emphasizing the strong influence that non-work factors have within the workplace. This study has important implications for theory, methodology and statistical analysis, and practice in the field of work-related stressors and performance.