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.     

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.     

Managed care's Achilles heel: ethical immaturity

How can physician executives determine the prevailing values in the managed care arena? What are the consequences when values statements are ignored during decision-making? These questions can be answered using a process called ethical reasoning, which is different and more productive than making moral judgments, such as "is managed care good or bad?" Failing to include ethical reasoning in executive offices and boardrooms is a form of ethical immaturity. It fuels public suspicion that managed care's goal may be maximizing profit at all costs, as opposed to seeking reasonable profit through provision of dependable and accessible health care services. One outcome of ethical reasoning is rediscovering the basic truth that running one's business on competitive rather than altruistic principles is ethical whenever greater efficiencies and economic growth enlarge the size of the pie for everyone. Reasonable self-interest is a perfectly acceptable reason to act ethically. The time has come for physician executives to develop a basic understanding of pragmatic ethics, and to appreciate the value of adding ethical reasoning to the decision-making process.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

The social role theory of unethical leadership

Challenging the standard reasoning regarding leaders' ethical failures, we argue that a potent contributor to these failures is the social role expectations of leaders. We maintain that leaders' central role expectation of goal achievement contributes to the over-valuing of group goals and greater moral permissibility of the means used to achieve these goals. In studies 1 and 2 we demonstrated that the role of leader, relative to group member, is associated with an increased appraisal of group goals which is predicted by the leaders' role expectations and not driven by the psychological effects of power. Next, we experimentally demonstrated the importance of both role expectations of leadership and group goal importance in leaders' justification to engage in morally questionable behavior to achieve group goals. Finally, we supported the social role predictions in a laboratory experiment by assigning people to roles and assessing goal importance and unethical decision-making and behaviors.     

The Effects of the Recession on Attitudes toward Business Ethics: An Inter‐temporal Study of Business Students in 2001, 2009, and 2010

This inter‐temporal study compares the ethical attitudes of business students at three points: in 2001, when the economy was relatively healthy; in 2009, near the beginning of the current recession; and in 2010, when the economy was worse. Ethical attitudes were measured by replicating a popular survey consisting of 25 ethically charged vignettes. The survey measures willingness to engage in white‐collar crime behaviors, some clearly illegal; others marginally unethical. Findings show an increase in tolerance for clearly illegal behaviors from 2001 to 2009 and an increase in tolerance for an even broader array of unethical acts from 2009 to 2010. As compared with 2001 respondents, 2009 respondents were more tolerant of seriously illegal behaviors but less tolerant of marginally unethical ones. In 2010, respondents were more accepting of both kinds of unethical behaviors. The results also suggest that the change in ethical attitudes from 2009 to 2010 was larger than the average annual change in ethics from 2001 to 2009. These findings are discussed within the framework of classical strain theory, Agnew's General Strain Theory, and the legitimacy of social institutions.     

Prophets vs. profits: How market competition influences leaders' disciplining behavior towards ethical transgressions

We investigate how market competition influences the way leaders discipline employees' ethical transgressions. A cross-sectional study among organizational leaders (Study 1) revealed that strong market competition is related to an instrumental decision frame (business practices are more focused on serving the organization's interest). This decision frame explains why strong market competition is related to leaders' perceptions of the evaluation of wrongdoing in terms of instrumental rather than moral concerns. Two experiments (Studies 2 and 3) show that increased market competition makes leaders' disciplining of ethical transgressions more contingent upon the transgression's instrumentality to the organization: the same ethical transgression is punished less when it resulted in profit than when it resulted in loss. This research is among the first to identify conditions that determine disciplinary responses of organization leaders to ethical transgressions, and it feeds the debate on whether market competition promotes the display of unethical behavior within organizations.     

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.     

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).

     

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.     

Approach,Ability, Aftermath: A Psychological Process Framework of Unethical Behavior at Work

Abstract

Many of the scandalous organizational practices to have come to light in the last decade—rigging LIBOR, misselling payment protection insurance, rampant Wall Street insider trading, large-scale bribery of foreign officials, and the packaging and sale of toxic securities to naïve investors—require ethically problematic judgments and behaviors. However, dominant models of workplace unethical behavior fail to account for what we have learned from moral psychology and cognitive neuroscience in the past two decades about how and why people make the moral decisions they do. In this review, we explain how intuition, affect, physiology, and identity support and inform more deliberative reasoning process in the construction and enactment of moral behavior. We then describe how these processes play into how individuals approach a potential moral choice, whether they have the ability in the moment to enact it, and how it is encoded in the action' aftermath, feeding back into future approaches. Throughout, we attend to the role of organizational context in influencing these processes. By reviewing this large body of research and presenting a new framework that attempts to integrate these new findings, our hope is to motivate new research about how to support more moral workplace behavior that starts from what we know now.     

Ethical leadership and follower organizational deviance: The moderating role of follower moral attentiveness

The literature on ethical leadership has focused primarily on the way ethical leaders influence follower moral judgment and behavior. It has overlooked that follower responses to ethical leaders may differ depending on the attention they pay to the moral aspects of leadership. In the present research, we introduce moral attentiveness as an important moderator for the relationship between ethical leadership and unethical employee behavior. In a multisource field study (N = 90), we confirm our hypothesis that morally attentive followers respond with more deviance to unethical leaders. An experimental study (N = 96) replicates the finding. Our paper extends the current leader-focused literature by examining how follower moral attentiveness determines the response of followers to ethical or unethical leadership.     

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.     

Multiobjective investment planning under uncertainty

In this paper we consider the relevance of various planning methods and decision criteria to multiobjective investment planning under uncertainty. Assuming that a natural reaction to uncertainty is to operate so as to leave open as many good options as possible (as opposed to maximizing subjective expected utility) we argue that the planning process should concentrate on analyzing the effects of the initial decision, and that for this exercise the classical methods of mixed integer programming are inappropriate. We demonstrate how the technique of dynamic programming can be extended to take account of multiple objectives and use dynamic programming as a framework in which we analyze the robustness of an initial decision in the face of various types of uncertainty. In so doing we also analyze the risks involved in both the planning and decision making functions.     

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.     

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.     

Doing Our Best: Optimization and the Management of Risk

Tools and concepts of optimization are widespread in decision‐making, design, and planning. There is a moral imperative to “do our best.” Optimization underlies theories in physics and biology, and economic theories often presume that economic agents are optimizers. We argue that in decisions under uncertainty, what should be optimized is robustness rather than performance. We discuss the equity premium puzzle from financial economics, and explain that the puzzle can be resolved by using the strategy of satisficing rather than optimizing. We discuss design of critical technological infrastructure, showing that satisficing of performance requirements—rather than optimizing them—is a preferable design concept. We explore the need for disaster recovery capability and its methodological dilemma. The disparate domains—economics and engineering—illuminate different aspects of the challenge of uncertainty and of the significance of robust‐satisficing.     

基于证据推理的不确定多属性决策方法

针对基本属性权重的不确定性,以及基本属性与广义属性评价集的不一致性等问题,提出一种基于证据推理的不确定多属性决策方法,将证据推理算法推广到更一般的决策环境中.根据决策矩阵的信息熵客观地获得属性的权系数;而对于基本属性与广义属性评价集不一致的情况,则通过对基本属性分布评价的模糊化及模糊变换,合理地实现到广义分布评价的统一形式;最后应用证据推理算法得到整个方案集的排序.实例结果表明,该方法是可行的、有效的.