Perceived moral intensity,ethical perception,and ethical intention of American and Malaysian managers: a comparative study

In this study, differences in perceived moral intensity, ethical perception, and ethical intention of managers from the United States and Malaysia are investigated. Models are proposed with perceived moral intensity, ethical perception, and ethical intention as dependent variables, the country of residence of the managers as the independent variable, and gender and age of the managers as covariates. By using scenarios involving ethical situations, it is found that American managers perceive higher levels of moral intensity than Malaysian managers on the components that relate to the extent of harm done to the victim. However, there are no significant differences between the two groups on those components that relate to social pressure. Also, the ethical perception and ethical intention of American managers are higher than those of Malaysian managers. An explanation for the direction of the differences is offered based on the divergence of the United States and Malaysia with respect to the societal moral climate, organizational culture, cultural factors, and cognitive moral development. Implications and suggestions for future research are also offered.     

Moral Intensity and Managerial Problem Solving

There is an increasing interest in how managers describe and respond to what they regard as moral versus nonmoral problems in organizations. In this study, forty managers described a moral problem and a nonmoral problem that they had encountered in their organization, each of which had been resolved. Analyses indicated that: (1) the two types of problems could be significantly differentiated using four of Jones' (1991) components of moral intensity; (2) the labels managers used to describe problems varied systematically between the two types of problems and according to the problem's moral intensity; and (3) problem management processes varied according to the problem's type and moral intensity.     

Agents or Stewards? Linking Managerial Behavior and Moral Development

The goal of this paper is to connect managerial behavior on the “agent-steward” scale to managerial moral development and motivation. I introduce agent- and steward-like behavior: the former is self-serving while the latter is others-serving. I suggest that managerial moral development and motivation may be two of the factors that may predict the tendency of managers to behave in a self-serving way (like agents) or to serve the interests of the organization (like stewards). Managers at low levels of moral development are more likely to behave like agents, while managers at higher levels of moral development are more likely to behave like stewards. I also argue that managers at the highest level of moral development may serve the interests of people other than the firm’s owners and thereby transfer wealth from the firm’s owners to third parties. Moral motivation is likely to be a factor that moderates the proposed relationships. Finally, I develop propositions that address the role of material incentives in controlling behavior of managers at different levels of moral development.     

The Effect of Moral Philosophy and Ethnocentrism on Quality-of-Life Orientation in International Marketing: A Cross-Culturaal Comparison

This paper examines the effects of moral philosophy and ethnocentrism on quality of life orientation in international marketing. It also provides a cross-cultural comparison of ethical values between Koreans and Americans. International quality-of-life (IQOL) orientation refers to marketers' disposition to make decisions to enhance the well-being of consumers in foreign markets while preserving the well-being of other stakeholders. It is hypothesized that marketers' moral philosophy and ethnocentrism influence the development of marketers' IQOL. Specifically, the higher the IQOL orientation of international managers, the higher their moral idealism, the higher their moral relativism, and the lower their ethnocentrism. Also, it is hypothesized that American managers are likely to score higher on moral relativism but lower on moral idealism compared to their Korean counterparts. Also, Korean managers are expected to be more ethnocentric than American managers. Data were collected from business professionals who enrolled in professional MBA courses both from the U.S. and Korea. The results provided support for the hypothesized relationships. Managerial implications of these relationships are discussed.     

Assessing the “Tone at the Top”: The Moral Reasoning of CEOs in the Automobile Industry

Relying on an expanded view of leadership and the moral reasoning framework developed by Lawrence Kohlberg (1981), this study explores the moral reasoning of the chief executive officers at the 11 largest automobile manufacturers in the world. Using the CEOs’ letter to their stakeholders found in the organizations’ annual social responsibility reports, the CEOs’ moral reasoning is compared to other managers’ moral reasoning, and the moral reasoning exhibited within the CEO group is analyzed for differences due to regional location. Contrary to conventional understanding based on prior research, the CEOs in our sample did not exhibit moral reasoning at a higher level than a cross section of managers but there were differences within the sample of CEOs when looking at nationality. Implications of these results for CEOs, managers, academics, and others are explored.     

Competitive Irrationality in Transitional Economies: Are Communist Managers Less Irrational?

Why do marketing managers in the transitional economies of Eastern Europe and China often engage in competitively irrational behavior, choosing pricing strategies that damage competitors’ profits, rather than choosing pricing strategies that improve their firm’s profits? We propose one possible reason, the moral vacuum created by the collapse of communist ideology. We hypothesize and find that managers who experienced formal communist moral ideological indoctrination are less likely to be competitively irrational than the post-communist managers who did not. Implications are discussed.     

Consumer Insurance Fraud/Abuse as Co-creation and Co-responsibility: A New Paradigm

This article discusses the implications of moral dissonance for managers, and how dissonance induced self justification can create an amplifying feedback loop and downward spiral of immoral behaviour. After addressing the nature of moral dissonance, including the difference between moral and hedonistic dissonance, the writer then focuses on dissonance reduction strategies available to managers such as rationalization, self affirmation, self justification, etc. It is noted that there is a considerable literature which views the organization as a potentially corrupting institution and a source of acute levels of moral dissonance. A simplified process model linking immoral behaviour, dissonance and rationalization is mooted, and some recent theories which question traditional dissonance models, including the free choice paradigm (FCP), are considered. The writer concludes that in the light of the above mentioned critical theories, it may be assumed that the levels of moral dissonance, and the extent of rationalization/self justification amongst managers, are more a function of personality and situational factors than previously assumed.     

The uses of moral talk: Why do managers talk ethics?

When managers use moral expressions in their communications, they do so for several, sometimes contradictory reasons. Based upon analyses of interviews with managers, this article examines seven distinctive uses of moral talk, sub-divided into three groupings: (1) managers use moral talk functionally to clarify issues, to propose and criticize moral justifications, and to cite relevant norms; (2) managers also use moral talk functionally to praise and to blame as well as to defend and criticize structures of authority; finally (3) managers use moral talk dysfunctionally to rationalize morally ambiguous behavior and to express frustrations. The article concludes with several practical recommendations.Frederick Bird teaches Comparative Ethics at Concordia University, where he is an associate professor. He has recently written a text on the comparative sociological study of moral systems as well as a number of articles on business ethics and contemporary religious movements.Frances Westley is an Assistant Professor of Policy at McGill University in Montreal. She publishes in the area of visionary leadership, organizational culture and change, and strategic communications. James A. Waters was Dean, Graduate School of Management at Boston College. His research interests concerned the process of strategy formation in complex organizations, organizational change and development, and ethics in organizations. His work has been published in such journals as Organizational Dynamics, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, California Management Review, Business Horizons, Journal of Applied Psychology, Business and Society, Canadian Journal of Administrative Science, Advanced Management Journal, Journal of Business Ethics, Organizational Behavior Teaching Review, and numerous anthologies. He died January 4, 1989.     

Desire to be ethical or ability to self‐control: Which is more crucial for ethical behavior?

Promoting ethical decisions and behaviors is challenging for any organization. Yet managers are still required to make ethical decisions under conditions which deplete their self‐control resources, such as high stress and long hours. This study examines the relationships among symbolic and internal moral identity, self‐control, and ethical behavior, and investigates whether self‐control acts as the mechanism through which moral identity leads to ethical behavior. Findings indicate that internal moral identity overrides symbolic moral identity in the relationship with self‐control and that self‐control fully mediates the relationship between internal moral identity and ethical behavior. The implications for organizations is that while rules, procedures, and ethics training are useful, managers with a strong moral compass will be more likely to practice self‐control leading to more ethical behaviors.     

An empirical study of moral reasoning among managers

Current research in moral development suggests that there are two distinct modes of moral reasoning, one based on a morality of justice, the other based on a morality of care. The research presented here examines the kinds of moral reasoning used by managers in work-related conflicts. Twenty men and twenty women were randomly selected from the population of first level managers in a Fortune 100 industrial corporation. In open-ended interviews each participant was asked to describe a situation of moral conflict in her or his work life. The results indicated a clearly preferred mode of moral reasoning among the participants who described moral conflicts. Nearly all of these predominated with a justice orientation. These findings suggest that a correlation between gender and preferred mode may be context specific.Robbin Derry is an associate professor at The American College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where she holds the Lamont Post Chair in Business Ethics. She recently completed a year as a Rockefeller Fellow at The Ethics Institute at Darthmouth College. She has presented and published numerous articles on the ethical decision-making of managers and is currently working on a business ethics textbook.     

The Third Eye: Exploring Guanxi and Relational Morality in the Workplace

We examine the use of Confucian relational morality as an alternative reference point to that of modernist morality in judging workplace ethical conduct. A semi-structured interview based study involving 46 ethnic Chinese managers and 30 non-Chinese expatriate managers in Singapore, provided evidence of the use of traditional guanxi-linked morality as a moral resource by some of the former group in judging workplace ethical dilemmas. While such morality played only a minor role in moral reasoning, and was largely overshadowed by modernist morality, the research nonetheless demonstrates that moral reasoning reflects wider cultural heritage, and is not merely a function of corporate culture and individual moral development.     

Human Resource Management in a Compartmentalized World: Whither Moral Agency?

This article examines the potential for moral agency in human resource management practice. It draws on an ethnographic study of human resource managers in a global organization to provide a theorized account of situated moral agency. This account suggests that within contemporary organizations, institutional structures??particularly the structures of Anglo-American market capitalism??threaten and constrain the capacity of HR managers to exercise moral agency and hence engage in ethical behaviour. The contextualized explanation of HR management action directly addresses the question of whether HRM is inherently unethical. The discussion draws on MacIntyre??s (Philosophy 74:311?C329, 1999, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Duckworth, 2000) conceptualization of moral agency within contemporary social structures. In practice, HR managers embody roles that may not be wholly compartmentalized. Alternative institutional structures can provide HR managers with a vocabulary of motives for people-centred HRM and widen the scope for the exercising of moral agency, when enacted within reflective relational spaces that provide milieus for critical questioning of logics and values. This article aims to contribute to and extend debate on whether HRM can ever be ethical, and provide a means of reconnecting business ethics with longstanding concerns in critical management studies.     

Moral Reasoning Skills: Are Entrepreneurs Different?

Drawing on existing theory in the fields of business ethics, entrepreneurship, and psychology, this research provides an initial empirical exploration of whether entrepreneurs use cognitive reasoning processes which reflect a higher level of moral development than the level of moral development that has been empirically observed either in middle-level managers or in the general adult population. The Defining Issues Test was used to measure the level of moral reasoning skill of the entrepreneurs in this study. Although the study was limited by a small sample size and the inherent difficulty of making accurate comparisons across other empirical studies, the results of this study suggest that entrepreneurs may exhibit moral reasoning skills at a slightly higher level than middle-level managers or the general adult population.     

不同基金组织形式下管理人行为的博弈分析

建立了基金管理人与投资者之间的不完全信息动态博弈模型,用以说明不同基金组织形式下基金管理人行为选择的差异。研究认为管理人的行为选择是其相机抉择的结果,开放式基金制度是否对管理人有更强约束力,取决于监督机制、声誉机制、管理人收入方案等因素。在模型分析的基础上,提出了减轻管理人机会主义行为的制度设计方案。     

Developing Moral Principles and Scenarios in the Light of Diversity: An Extension to the Multidimensional Ethics Scale

The purpose of this article is to develop the multidimensional ethics scale and moral scenarios that allow or even support diversity in managers’ reactions when measuring their moral decision-making. This means that we expand the multidimensional ethics scale with a female ethics dimension and take a critical look at the previously used scenarios in the light of diversity. Furthermore, we develop two new scenarios in order to better attain diversity in managers’ moral decision-making. Diversity is primarily looked at from a gender perspective, meaning that we pay attention to the femininities and masculinities of the scale items and scenarios. In addition, we use the concept of social desirability to assess diversity as we presume that social desirability works against diversity. Our article builds on previous research using the multidimensional ethics scale. First, we present a summary of the theoretical dimensions of the original multidimensional ethics scale and extend the scale with female ethics principles to foster diversity. Second, we analyse and assess previously used moral scenarios in order to see how they permit the expression of diversity. Third, we develop two new scenarios based on the interviews conducted with female managers.     

A Cognitive Elaboration Model of Sustainability Decision Making: Investigating Financial Managers’ Orientation Toward Environmental Issues

This empirical paper examines individual-level cognitive factors associated with developing an orientation to sustainable development issues among a population of business practitioners from France. Across two studies, we survey 180 financial managers and 83 finance students, as well as 144 managers from other business disciplines and 117 non-finance business students. We consider ability and motivation variables integrated and adapted into a cognitive elaboration model for sustainable decision making. Specifically, we examine the degree of influence of two factors on the ethical sensitivity to sustainability: the moral maturity of the individual, and the perceived moral intensity of a sustainability issue. Our investigation offers insights into how financial managers perceive the importance of sustainability for corporate strategy.     

Moral Emotions and Ethics in Organisations: Introduction to the Special Issue

The aim of our special issue is to deepen our understanding of the role moral emotions play in organisations as part of a wider discourse on organisational ethics and morality. Unethical workplace behaviours can have far-reaching consequences—job losses, risks to life and health, psychological damage to individuals and groups, social injustice and exploitation and even environmental devastation. Consequently, determining how and why ethical transgressions occur with surprising regularity, despite the inhibiting influence of moral emotions, has considerable theoretical and practical significance to management scholars and managers alike. In this introduction, we present some of the core arguments in the field; notably, the effect of organisational life and bureaucracy on emotions, in general, and moral emotions, in particular; the moral standing of leaders, managers and followers; moral challenges raised by obedience and resistance to organisational power and ethical blindspots induced by what may appear as deeply moral emotions. These issues are explored by a collection of geographically diverse articles in various work contexts, which are thematically organised in terms of (i) moral emotions, ethical behaviour and social pressure, (ii) moral emotions and their consequences within/across levels of analysis, (iii) psychoanalytic perspectives on the management of moral emotions, (iv) virtue and moral emotions and (v) moral emotions and action tendencies. We end by suggesting certain avenues for future research in the hope that the endeavour initiated here will inspire improved practice at work.     

Personal Characteristics Underlying Ethical Decisions in Marketing Situations: A Survey of Small Business Managers*

This study analyzes the marketing ethics decision‐making process of small business managers. In particular, it examines the relative influences of ethical perceptions, personal moral philosophies, and gender on ethical intentions of small business managers. The sample of this study consists of professional members of the American Marketing Association working in companies with 500 employees or fewer. The results reveal that perceived ethical problem is a positive factor of a small business manager's ethical intention. The results generally support our hypothesis that female managers tend to be more ethical in their intention than their male counterparts. However, the results indicate that neither dimension of personal moral philosophy—idealism and relativism—is a significant predictor of a manager's ethical intention.