Culture Comes First: Introduction to the Special Issue

The Special Issue “Culture Comes First” attracted fifty five submissions offering a diverse collection of contributions from scholars within the domain. The Editorial team reviewed many interesting papers and the result of the process of review and revision by the team is nine papers and one commentary. The papers in this special topic issue include a wide variety of topics with application to scholars and management practitioners and aspects of these papers are summarized in this introduction. The introduction offers some thoughts about the process of scholarly publication and briefly discusses some cultural facets of current business training and the practice of management.     

The Connectedness Decision Paradigm: Group Decision, Negotiation and Leadership in World Problems

We discuss connectedness, a dynamic unity relation experience. The Connectedness Decision Paradigm (CDP) is a formal, general systems-spirituality framework, technology-supported, for group decision and negotiation (GDN) and leadership in making “right” decisions. A right problem/solution is validated by a spiritual rationality validation test involving connectedness. A participant (agent) may experience connectedness with purposes (intended results). Purposes for which there is reciprocated (shared) purpose connectedness across agents constitute common ground for these agents. A basic idea is to identify and expand such common ground. Even in difficult problem solving, as with polarization, where there seems to be little or no common ground, a priori there is always the ultimate purpose common ground of connectedness with One (spirituality) from which other common ground as connectedness with the “other” can arise. Common ground can lead to additional common ground and to an agreed problem solution—itself constituting common ground—that can be tested for rightness. Our focus here is on human agents considered as spiritual purposeful complex adaptive systems in multiagent environments. The ideas are applicable to other agents with lesser or greater capabilities than humans according to their capabilities. Expanding earlier work, this commentary on CDP is also based on GDN 2012, 2013 meeting remarks by the author, as well as on a lecture, “Hope on the Edge of Chaos: The New Connectedness Paradigm in World Affairs”, Hamilton Hall, Salem, Massachusetts, February 2012. In presenting CDP, this commentary is also a call for problem solving frameworks for GDN and leadership, and solutions to world problems.     

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.