Influence of Personal Values and Value Congruence on Unethical Practices and Work Behavior

The study examines whether (a) personal and organizational values differ in private and public sectors, and (b) personal values and value congruence – the extent of matching between personal and organizational values – influence unethical practices and work behavior. Three hundred and forty middle-level managers from four manufacturing organizations rated 22 values as guiding principles to them to identify their personal values. In order to index organizational values, 56 top-level managers of the same organizations rated how important such values were to the organization. Results revealed that the important shared values among managers of private and public sectors are product quality and customer service. Congruence between personal and organizational values is found to be higher in the private sector compared to the public sector. Middle-level managers in the private sector shared the organizational values more than the managers in the public sector. Irrespective of the type of organizations and age of managers, personal values more potently and consistently decreased unethical practices and increased work behavior compared to value congruence. Hiring managers emphasizing personal values can demote unethical practices and promote work behavior.     

Corporate Fraud and Managers’ Behavior: Evidence from the Press

Government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) and quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations (quangos) comprise a powerful organizational sector that has been criticized for its lack of accountability to governments and their citizens. These organizations are established to serve the public as a whole by targeting the needs of particular groups or fulfilling specific functions. Often they use practices adopted from the business sector, and sometimes they enter the marketplace as profit-making enterprises. In light of the contribution of GSE Fannie Mae to the 2008 world economic crisis, the impact of this sector on effective democratic government bears further examination. In this article, I present a systems model that suggests how researchers might comprehensively assess the accountability of organizations in this sector, here termed the “gray sector,” with respect to their government missions. I focus on four systems dimensions: mission, organizational design, organizational outcomes, and the information feedback process. Organizational design and the nature of the sector population are cited as emerging issues of particular importance.     

组织学习及其作用机制的实证研究

The organizational learning construct and its effective mechanism are two research issues. This study is based on a survey of 908 managers and employees from 43 companies in different regions of China. The results of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) show that organizational learning in Chinese enterprises is a multi-dimensional construct comprising of inter-organizational learning, organization-level learning, collective learning, individual learning, exploitation learning and exploration learning. The results of hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) reveal that the unit-level dimensions of organizational learning affect employee’s satisfaction and emotional commitment through the mediation of individual learning. In organizations characterized by high level of organization-level learning and low level of exploitation learning, there is a strong correlation between employees’ satisfaction/emotional commitment and their turnover intention. Hierarchical regression analysis (HRA) also indicates that organizational learning affects perceived organizational financial performance through the full mediation of organizational innovation. Some implications are discussed for organizational learning research and practice. Translated and revised from Guanli Kexue Xuebao 管理科学学报 (Journal of Management Sciences in China), 2007, 10(5): 48–61     

Working with Corporate Social Responsibility in Brazilian Companies: The Role of Managers’ Values in the Maintenance of CSR Cultures

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) refers to the duty of management to consider and respond to issues beyond the organization’s economic and legal requirements in line with social and environmental values. However, ‘management’ is constituted by real people responsible for routine decisions and formulation and implementation of policies. It can be said therefore that the ethical ideals and beliefs of these individuals – in particular their personal values – play an important role in their decisions. It is contended in this article that the personal values of managers may contribute to the creation and maintenance of ‘CSR cultures’ in their organizations; that is, organizational cultures focused on ensuring environmental and social sustainability. Based on an exploratory study carried out in Brazil in 2008, this article explores the perceptions of five CSR managers in relation to the influence of their personal values on their work. The first part discusses the notion of CSR within the context of Brazilian society, the second provides a brief literature review on the link between values and organizational cultures and the third explores the perceptions of the participating managers, identifying the main thematic patterns that emerged in the study.     

Ethical Value-Added: Fair Trade and the Case of Café Femenino

The complex global business environment has created a host of problems for managers, none of which is more difficult to address than bullying in the workplace. The rapid rate of change and the ever-increasing complexity of organizational environments of business throughout the world have increased the opportunity for bullying to occur more frequently. This article addresses the foundations of bullying by examining the ‘nature’ (i.e., bullying behavior influenced by the innate genetic make-up of an individual) and the ‘nurture’ (i.e., individuals learn to be bullies and environments allow the behavior to perpetuate) arguments for the occurrence of bullying behavior. In addition, guidelines are presented for managers in global organizations to use in assessing and monitoring bullying activities in global organizations.     

‘If I Should Fall From Grace…’: Stories of Change and Organizational Ethics

Although studies in organizational storytelling have dealt extensively with the relationship between narrative, power and organizational change, little attention has been paid to the implications of this for ethics within organizations. This article addresses this by presenting an analysis of narrative and ethics as it relates to the practice of organizational downsizing. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s theories of narrative and ethics, we analyze stories of organizational change reported by employees and managers in an organization that had undergone persistent downsizing. Our analysis maintains that the presence of a dominant story that seeks to legitimate organizational change also serves to normalize it, and that this, in turn, diminishes the capacity for organizations to scrutinize the ethics of their actions. We argue that when organizational change narratives become singularized through dominant forms of emplotment, ethical deliberation and responsibility in organizations are diminished. More generally, we contend that the narrative closure achieved by the presence of a dominant narrative amongst employees undergoing organizational change is antithetical to the openness required for ethical questioning.     

Business Ethics in a Transition Economy: Will the Next Russian Generation be any Better?

This study investigated students’ perceptions of ethical organizational climates, attitudes towards ethical issues, and the perceived relationship between ethical behavior and success in business organizations. Comparisons were made between the attitudes of these future managers with previously published studies of Russian managers’ attitudes. A survey of 100 business students in three Moscow universities showed that their attitudes toward ethical behavior were more negative than those of Russian managers. No significant differences were found in the perceptions or attitudes of students who had attended an ethics course and those that did not. The implications for both managers and researchers were reported.     

组织认同对建言的影响：基于组织的自尊和工作价值观的作用

员工建言在提高组织运行中扮演重要的角色,由于员工常常担心建言会威胁到组织的现状并使领导感到难堪而不愿发表自己的意见,如何促进员工建言是学者们普遍关注的主题。文章采用12家企业的145名员工和37名直接主管的配对问卷数据,运用多元线性回归方法检验了组织认同对基于组织的自尊的影响,基于组织的自尊在组织认同与建言之间的中介作用,以及工作价值观对基于组织的自尊与建言的调节作用。研究显示：组织认同显著正向影响基于组织的自尊;基于组织的自尊部分中介组织认同对建言的作用;工作价值观各维度中只有内在偏好工作价值观在基于组织的自尊与建言的关系中起正向调节作用。文章对充实组织认同和建言文献有重要的意义,可以为企业激励员工建言提供理论指导。     

Hypocrisies of Fairness: Towards a More Reflexive Ethical Base in Organizational Justice Research and Practice

Despite becoming one of the most active research areas in organizational behavior, the field of organizational justice has stayed at a safe distance from moral questions of values, as well as from critical questions regarding the implications of fairness considerations on the status quo of power relations in today’s organizations. We argue that both organizational justice research and the managerial practices it informs lack reflexivity. This manifests itself in two possible hypocrisies of fairness. Managers may apply organizational justice knowledge but fail to increase the actual levels of fairness in employment relations. Researchers, on the other hand, may claim to promote fairness through their work while actually providing managers with tools that enable or even encourage them to feed the hypocrisy of fairness identified above. As␣part of our argument, we identify three types of mechanisms managers may use to influence and manage the formation of fairness perceptions. We consider how the exercise of power is related to the potential application of organizational justice knowledge across individual, interpersonal and social levels. Our approach makes power dynamics and moral implications salient, and questions the purely subjectivist view of justice researchers that deliberately discards normative aspects. The questions opened up by considering alternative mechanisms for creating fairness perceptions have led us to formulate a research agenda for organizational justice research that takes multiple stakeholder interests, power dynamics and ethical implications into account. We believe that the fields of organizational justice and normative justice can benefit from combined research. Marion Fortin (Ph.D., Trinity College Dublin) is Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at the Durham Business School, Durham University. Marion previously worked in the financial industry and also was a visiting scholar at the Stern School, NYU. Marion’s main research interest lies in the role of justice judgments in the workplace. Her current and past research projects also involve issues of organizational change, power mechanisms, and the role of emotions in organizations. Martin R. Fellenz (Ph.D., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour at the School of Business, University of Dublin, Trinity College. His research interests include organizational justice, organizational transformation and change, teaching and learning, and the development of theory and theory schools. He regularly contributes to executive education programs in a variety of countries and consults with leading international public, private and not-for-profit organizations on matters of leadership, management development, and organizational transformation. A previous version of this paper was originally presented at the IESE Business School, University of Navarra, for the 14th International Symposium on Ethics, Business and Society: “Towards a Comprehensive Integration of Ethics Into Management: Problems and Prospects”. May 18–19, 2006).     

Ethics in Practice: What Are Managers Really Doing?

This study asked managers with different educational backgrounds and experience from a variety of industries of a variety of sizes representing both genders and various predominant managerial functions at different levels to “describe the skills they think are necessary to perform their jobs effectively”. In particular, they were asked to rank 178 behavioral skills presented under 22 different categories that described different aspects of management. Data were then examined first to determine the importance of ethics or integrity overall in the group of managerial activities and then to explore how specific ethical activities of managers differ across various managerial and organizational characteristics. Findings indicate that ethics is still considered one of the least important skills necessary in managers’ daily work. However, once specific ethical activities are analyzed separately, significant differences are found across characteristics of managers, as well as those of the organizations at which they work.     

The Functionality of Gray Area Ethics in Organizations

All organizations have gray areas where the border between right and wrong behavior is blurred, but where a major part of organizational decision-making takes place. While gray areas can be sources of problems for organizations, they also have benefits. The author proposes that gray areas are functional in organizations. Gray areas become problematic when the process for dealing with them is flawed, when gatekeeper managers see themselves as more ethical than their peers, and when leaders, by their own inattention, inaction, and poor modeling, minimize the importance of building a moral community by delegating gray area issues to second-tier administrators. Gray areas provide wiggle room in coping with ethical dilemmas in organizations.     

Relationships among Perceived Organizational Core Values, Corporate Social Responsibility, Ethics, and Organizational Performance Outcomes: An Empirical Study of Information Technology Professionals

This study is an extension of our recent ethics research in direct marketing (2003) and information technology (2007). In this study, we investigated the relationships among core organizational values, organizational ethics, corporate social responsibility, and organizational performance outcome. Our analysis of online survey responses from a sample of IT professionals in the United States indicated that managers from organizations with organic core values reported a higher level of social responsibility relative to managers in organizations with mechanistic values; that managers in both mechanistic and organic organizations which were perceived as more socially responsible were also perceived as more ethical; and that perceived ethical attitudes and social responsibility were significantly associated with organizational performance outcome measures. Our article discusses research premises, conceptual framework, hypotheses, research methodology, data analysis, recommendations for further research, and conclusions.     

Causes and consequences of managerial failure in rapidly changing organizations

To survive in today's ultra-competitive business environment, organizations must better understand the factors that cause managers to fail to achieve desired results. To that end, focus group data was collected from 1040 managers from over 100 different U.S. manufacturing and service organizations experiencing large scale organizational change in order to help identify the primary causes of managerial failure. This article discusses the 15 primary causes of managerial failure identified in the study, along with their perceived consequences to managerial and organizational performance. Ultimately, it is hoped that this will provide a guide for improving the effectiveness of both individual managers and the organizations they serve.     

People-Oriented Marketing Managers in Service Organizations

Abstract

This paper explores the role of people-oriented marketing managers in service organizations. In particular, the interaction variables between organizational behavior of managers and organizational design issues are analyzed. Variables addressed include the following: centralization, decentralization, bureaucracy, matrix management, open environment, individuality, people as resource, unification of people, handling people problems, democratic methods, development of people, and importance of people.     

中国企业的学习型组织文化:基于人口统计变量、企业属性、工作满意度和组织绩效的实证分析

By using a Western concept—the instrument called dimensions of learning organization questionnaire (DLOQ), and the data collected from 919 employees in nine companies located in Guangdong Province, China, the present empirical study explores the culture of learning organizations in Chinese business settings. Findings suggest that the DLOQ is applicable to the context of China as well, and those demographic variables, such as age and educational level, together with the types of ownership of Chinese companies, such as state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and privately-owned enterprises (POEs), suggest differences in the culture of learning organizations. Results also indicate that the learning organization culture of a firm has strongly positive impact on employees’ job satisfaction and perceived organizational performance. Two implications should be noted. First, as employees in middle age and with college education show the strongest sense of improving the learning culture, it can be inferred that demographic characters and groups may influence the organization’s learning culture differently. Second, as POEs have a better learning atmosphere than SOEs, it can be inferred that POEs have a stronger competitiveness than SOEs in terms of learning ability and organizational performance. To indigenize the Western construct and instrument of learning organizations, the present study, as an exploratory research, gives substantial knowledge on the subject and seeks to fill the gap in the literature, despite the limitations of cultural nuances and a narrowly-concentrated sample.     

Wearables in the workplace: The brave new world of employee engagement

Organizations increasingly introduce wearable devices, hoping to improve organizational performance. Wearables provide new and unique opportunities for engaging employees with their work and their organizational environment. The performance-related feedback these devices provide is supposed to help both employees and managers navigate the work environment more effectively. Despite the compelling benefits of wearables, they may prove to be detrimental to organizational performance unless a number of ethical issues are addressed. This article provides an overview of the benefits that certain wearable technologies can provide employees and managers, as well as the challenges they may create for organizations.     

A Word to the Wise: How Managers and Policy-Makers can Encourage Employees to Report Wrongdoing

When successful and ethical managers are alerted to possible organizational wrongdoing, they take corrective action before the problems become crises. However, recent research [e.g., Rynes et al. (2007, Academy of Management Journal 50(5), 987–1008)] indicates that many organizations fail to implement evidence-based practices (i.e., practices that are consistent with research findings), in many aspects of human resource management. In this paper, we draw from years of research on whistle-blowing by social scientists and legal scholars and offer concrete suggestions to managers who are interested in encouraging internal reporting of problems requiring attention, and to observers of questionable activity who are considering reporting it. We also identify ways that research suggests policy-makers can have a more positive influence. We hope that these suggestions will help foster evidence-based practice regarding whistle-blowing.     

Assessments on the competency model of senior managers of family firms in China

Based on the critical behavioral event interviews with 18 senior managers of family firms, the current study developed a competency model for senior managers of family firms in China. The primary findings are as follows. First, using the Critical Behavioral Event Interview (BEI) to develop the competency model of senior managers, the occurrence frequency and mean level scores of competencies are comparatively stable measures and the competencies’ maximal level scores are influenced by interview length. The study also found that both mean level scores and maximal level scores can differentiate superior senior managers from average senior managers of family firms. Second, the competency model of senior managers of family firms in China includes 11 competencies, namely authority orientation, initiative, opportunity-seizing, information seeking, organizational awareness, direction, benevolence orientation, self-control, self-confidence, self-learning, and impact and influence. Among them, nine competencies are consistent with those of the generic competency model of senior managers of Western enterprises and five with those of the generic competency model of senior managers of state-owned firms in China. Our results revealed that the authority orientation and benevolence orientation are the two competencies unique to the senior managers of family firms in China. __________ Translated from Xinli Xuebao 心理学报 (Acta Psychologica Sinica), 2004, 36(1): 110–115     

Principal Theory and Principle Theory: Ethical Governance from the Follower’s Perspective

Organizational governance has historically focused around the perspective of principals and managers and has traditionally pursued the goal of maximizing owner wealth. This paper suggests that organizational governance can profitably be viewed from the ethical perspective of organizational followers – employees of the organization to whom important ethical duties are also owed. We present two perspectives of organizational governance: Principal Theory that suggests that organizational owners and managers can often be ethically opportunistic and take advantage of employees who serve them and Principle Theory that focuses on guiding principles that are sometimes taken too far in organizations. In introducing these two new organizational governance perspectives, we offer insights into the value of rethinking ethical duties owed to organizational followers. Cam Caldwell received his Ph.D. from Washington State University where he was a Thomas S. Foley Graduate Fellow. Dr. Caldwell is Editor of the Academy of Management Ethics website and a member of the Academy’s Ethics Committee. His research is primarily in the areas of ethical leadership, organizational governance, and developing organizational trust. Prior to obtaining his Ph.D., Caldwell worked for 25 years as a city manager, human resource director, and management consultant. Ranjan Karri is Assistant Professor of Management at Bryant College. He received his Ph.D. in strategic management from Washington State University. His research interests include corporate and business strategies, ethical leadership and corporate governance. Pamela Vollmar is an undergraduate student at the University of Houston – Victoria majoring in Business Management. She has worked for 25 years as an electrical specialist for a major engineering firm.     

Varieties of Win–Win Solutions to Problems with Ethical Dimensions

The purpose of this article is to help educators and managers learn about a variety of win–win solutions to problems with ethical dimensions. The hope is that the larger the variety of win–win solutions we can consider, the higher the probability that we can find at least one that satisfies both ethical and material concerns. This article is motivated by the experiences of managers who have found that they need win–win solutions because it is very difficult to effectively advocate ethical solutions to problems that lose money or do not make money for their organizations. The purpose of the article is not to build theory or a theoretical taxonomy of win–win solutions, but to gather from eclectic theoretical and applied sources a variety of win–win solutions that can help solve problems with ethical dimensions. Examples of the types of win–win solutions are illustrated. Ethical problems with win–win solutions are also considered.