The legitimacy of moral stress as a distinct form of general stress has long been debated in previous research. Moreover, individual-level antecedents of moral stress are yet to be tested among executives. This study investigates role identity saliency (by calculating the total saliency of roles and competition between roles) as an individual-level antecedent of managerial moral stress and turnover intent as a consequence of managerial moral stress among high-level strategic decision makers in organisations. We also analyse the moderating effect of moral attentiveness in these relationships. Survey data were collected from 264 strategic decision makers from small to large U.S.-based organisations. While controlling for overall stress, results support a moderated model, wherein individuals exhibiting a high level of moral attentiveness also demonstrated a significant positive relationship between work role competition and moral stress and between managerial moral stress and turnover intent. Surprisingly, total role saliency demonstrated a significant negative relationship with managerial moral stress for the same individuals. Overall, the results suggest that managerial moral stress may be a legitimate threat to executive retention, above and beyond general stress, for the individuals who are highly attentive to the moral aspects of their environment.
Building on an illustrative case of a systemic environmental threat and its multi‐stakeholder response, this paper draws attention to the changing political impacts of corporations in the digital age. Political Corporate Social Responsibility (PCSR) theory suggests an expanded sense of politics and corporations, including impacts that may range from voluntary initiatives to overcome governance gaps, to avoiding state regulation via corporate political activity. Considering digitalization as a stimulus, we explore potential responsibilities of corporations toward public goods in contexts with functioning governments. We show that digitalization—in the form of transparency, surveillance, and data‐sharing—offers corporations’ scope for deliberative public participation. The starry sky beetle infestation endangering public and private goods is thereby used to illustrate the possibility of expanding the political role of corporations in the digital sphere. We offer a contribution by conceptualizing data‐deliberation as a Habermasian variation of PCSR, defined as the (a) voluntary disclosure of corporate data and its transparent, open sharing with the public sector (b) along with the cooperation with governmental institutions on data analytics methods for examining large‐scale datasets (c) thereby complying with existing national and international regulations on data protection, in particular with respect to privacy and personal data.
This paper extends an ongoing discussion about establishing a sharper way to conduct ethical investigations into managerial virtue. It does so by relying on Alasdair MacIntyre's moral philosophy in place of those more dominant approaches taken by scholars who make up the field of positive social science. A connection is drawn herein between a MacIntyrean “narrative approach” to investigating managerial virtue and the idea of “work as a calling.” Specifically, it will be argued that the MacIntyrean-influenced idea of “work as a calling” provides a substantive moral vision that supports an understanding of how virtuous managers ought to narrate their primary workplace motivations. Ultimately, virtuous managers fulfill a “political calling” to support and sustain (a) good work, (b) the good of individual lives, and (c) the common good of communities that their organization reaches. To do this, they must rely on the “shepherd virtue” of practical wisdom ( phronesis ). Practical wisdom aids virtuous managers’ thinking about achieving the ends of their “calling” as well as any necessary course-corrections that ought to be made toward the better achievement of those good and worthy ends.
Corporate sustainability is a dynamic, socially constructed concept. Relatedly, to understand the variations in the disclosure of corporate sustainability activities across countries, we need to inherently explore their underlying sociopolitical contexts. At present our understanding in this regard, is deficient. We respond to this extant research gap by adopting a multi-country approach to investigate the relationship between countries' institutional environments and firms' sustainability disclosure (SD) practices, across six countries in the Southeast Asian region. Our findings reflect a common focus of Southeast Asian firms on community and human resources (HRs) related disclosures. Nevertheless, nuanced differences in their overall SD levels confirm the influence of differing legal, normative, and sociocultural systems in engendering greater disclosure and transparency at a national level. By quantifying the institutional environment and identifying external influencing factors, our study provides a useful framework grounded in neo-institutional theory to widen the existing understanding of how institutional pressures can be measured and compared across different contexts.
Recently, calls have grown louder for more stakeholder democracy that is, letting stakeholders participate in the process of organizing, decision-making, and governance in corporations, especially in the area of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. Despite the relevance of the subject, the impact of customer involvement in CSR on their company-related attitudes and behaviors still represents a major research void. The paper at hand develops a conceptual framework of consumer involvement in CSR based on the existing literature, theories of stakeholder democracy, and organizational boundaries as well as drawing from the qualitative focus group interviews (N = 24). The framework is tested on a large scale, two-time point field-experimental study (N = 3,397). More specifically, consumer reactions to three degrees of customer involvement (i.e., information, feedback, and dialogue) are tested in two different CSR domains (i.e., company-internal business process vs. company-external philanthropic CSR). Results indicate that the customer involvement in CSR has a more beneficial effect in terms of strengthening customer outcomes in CSR domains that directly affect external stakeholders of the company (i.e., philanthropic CSR) than in domains that mainly concern company-internal stakeholders (i.e., business process CSR).
The global refugee crisis has posed severe challenges to social stability and sustainable development around the world. While the business sector is expected to shoulder social responsibility in crisis relief efforts, our initial assessment shows that refugee-related corporate social responsibility (CSR) significantly diverged across the Global Fortune 500 corporations. To advance scholars and managers' understanding of this complex CSR issue, this study draws upon National Business System Theory to explore how country-level factors influence the multinational corporations' CSR communication about the refugee issue. Specifically, the study focuses on the strategic cross-sector alliances between corporations, NGOs, and IGOs. The analysis shows that in this controversial global crisis, the following factors of corporations' countries-of-origin can significantly affect the level of cross-sector CSR alliances: democracy levels, economic inequality levels, and unemployment rates. Findings of this study provide practical guidelines that can help managers to anticipate societal expectations when dealing with controversial social issues in an international setting. Our findings could also assist policymakers, NGOs, and IGOs to better design strategies to mobilize the corporate resources.
In Ethics Position Theory, relativism is the degree to which people believe that universal moral rules should not always be applied unwaveringly. Researchers often predict that highly relativistic individuals are characterized by questionable ethics given their ostensible self-interested "anything goes" approach. Corroborating evidence for such predictions, however, remains elusive. This paper suggested that high relativists are perhaps not unethical, and reviewed four decades of relevant literature in order to clarify the meaning and implications of the relativism construct. The portrait of relativism that emerged is often contrary to prevalent expectations. Relativistic individuals seem tolerant of ambiguity, open to experience, non-authoritarian, accepting of others with different backgrounds and lifestyles, and troubled by injustice. No persuasive evidence of questionable ethics is available. These findings have profound implications for managerial practice and suggest that highly relativistic employees may be among the most valuable. Future research grounded in an understanding of what relativism is rather than what it should be has the potential to allow a deeper understanding of this important construct to emerge. We also explore possible reasons why an inaccurate narrative about relativistic orientations may have emerged and persisted among both researchers and people generally.
This study investigated how firms respond to conflicting demands within the state. Using Chinese listed firms data, we found that firms linked with central government relate positively to environmental innovation, while firms located in provinces with gross domestic product (GDP) priority exhibited a negative influence on environmental innovation. Beyond the independent roles of central and local government expectations, we found that central and local government demands work interdependently to negatively affect firms' environmental innovation, such that firms located in GDP priority regions lower the positive impact of the central government on environmental innovation. The present study added to the existing literature by unpacking government roles into two competing sets of expectations, independently and interdependently.
In February 2020—or "back in the old days before coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)," as it feels now—we were thinking of a suitable hook for an editorial about Open Access and Open Science. Fast-forward only a few weeks, and parts of the global economy have come to a standstill, national borders have been closed, quarantines and curfews have been implemented, social distancing has become common sense, and most people would be able to name their favorite TV virologist. Which also means that the hook for an Open Access and Open Science editorial suddenly presented itself rather forcefully in the shape of COVID-19. Most of us are affected by COVID-19 in a multitude of ways both in our personal and professional lives. It has reminded us of the interconnectedness of the entire global community, and the common social and economic challenges facing all humanity, many of which have been intensified due to the economic slowdown. The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic has also amplified various forms of inequity, which while playing out differently in various economic contexts serve as a vivid reminder of latent forms of discrimination and bias affecting hundreds of millions of human beings across the planet every day. In many contexts, COVID-19 has also elicited heartbreaking ethical decision-making for politicians, policy makers, administrators, managers, and family members and we will live to think through and analyze the repercussions and implications of these for many years to come. From a teaching point of view, this certainly raises serious questions regarding the ways in which our institutions prepared decision-makers and our citizens for this type of crisis. From a research perspective, COVID-19 is possibly representative of the types of external shocks that we expect to be facing much more frequently in the not-too-distant future in light of the series of grand challenges (Eisenhardt, Graebner, & Sonenshein, 2016; George, Howard-Grenville, Joshi, & Tihanyi, 2016), we are confronted with. Overwhelmed health-care systems, rising unemployment, spiraling global debt, disrupted supply chains, and a range of other developments raise urgent questions in relation to degrowth, radical innovation, or resilience. At the same time, this type of massive discontinuous change (Winn, Kirchgeorg, Griffiths, Linnenluecke, & Günther, 2011) also provides us with unexpected opportunities: enforced or encouraged changes in travel behavior, production, and consumption patterns result in a sudden reduction in global carbon emissions and other dimensions of our ecological footprint. As such, they have the potential to form a punctuated equilibrium (Romanelli & Tushman, 1994) with regard to pro-environmental awareness and behavior, policy measures and, more generally, parts of the transition toward a more sustainable development. One rather unexpected outcome of the COVID-19 crisis has arguably already been the rapid digitization of the Higher Education sector, and there are other outcomes that are still unfolding, although our conscience and consciousness are not yet able to keep track. All of these changes highlight the need for rapid development of solid theory, practical decision-making models or ethical decision-making guidelines, and various new tools that can be useful during this pandemic, and more importantly post-pandemic, to be better prepared for expected future outbreaks. There have been an impressive number of immediate natural science initiatives in response to COVID-19. For example, COVID-19-related Open Access data repositories have been created (Xu et al., 2020), modeling those established for research into the human genome (Yozwiak, Schaffner, & Sabeti, 2015); real-time data visualization tools are provided by various actors (e.g., John Hopkins University, 2020; Roser, Ritchie, & Ortiz-Ospina, 2020; WHO, 2020); and Nature has established an "Open Peer Review platform" (Johansson & Saderi, 2020). Closer to (our disciplinary) home, noteworthy initiatives include the "COVID-19 Insights" series operated by a number of business sustainability networks (e.g., GRONEN, 2020) or the Academy of Management Learning & Education COVID-19 "Call for Questions" proposal (AMLE, 2020). All of these initiatives have in common that they aim to make research more inclusive and more immediately available, and thus blend into more general developments that have been labeled as Open Access and Open Science. While Open Access refers to the free availability of research outputs, typically in digital format, Open Science goes beyond that in calling for public accessibility of research data and more generally a collaborative research process (OECD, 2015). Ultimately, Open Access and Open Science are complementary ways of confronting the contemporary for-profit publishing model as we know it (Hiltzik, 2020). In the natural sciences in particular, Open Access and Open Science have emerged as mechanisms to promote quicker, more collaborative, and more inclusive knowledge generation. In the social sciences, the relative lack of these mechanisms—coupled with an oftentimes painstakingly slow peer review process—amplifies the risk that our research remains too slow, too fragmented and, quite simply, not relevant for decision-makers. Many of us will be able to recall cases of publishing a manuscript that was already somewhat outdated at the time it first appeared in print. Beyond the shortening of publication cycles, Open Access and Open Science hold a number of other generic advantages. Open Access publications are generally associated with wider readership and higher citation levels (Tennant et al., 2016); Open Science can help accelerating the pace of knowledge generation based on the fact that datasets are publicly and readily available for fellow researchers. There is also a quality dimension to Open Science, as a more transparent handling of datasets pushes professionalism and seeks to ensure the implementation of scientific norms that are otherwise difficult to check in the social sciences. As a first step, we would like to encourage you to consider Open Access and Open Science as options for your own research. There is of course a quite significant financial dimension to this question, in particular linked to Open Access. However, we would like to highlight two increasingly relevant pathways: BE:ER now has a wide and increasing variety of resources for authors seeking to contribute to the common good such as national affiliation policies as with Germany (Projekt DEAL) or associated university groups such as the Dutch VSNU Agreement. These policies are part of a coordinated strategy to enable a large-scale transition of today's scholarly journals to Open Access. To date, our publisher has engaged with nine of these separate agreements, facilitating both increased access to already published research and allowing authors to publish their own primary research and review articles Open Access, retaining copyright of their works. In many cases, the Publish and Read (PAR) fees and Gold Open Access APCs related to these policies are paid centrally via participating institutions. Authors of articles published in BE:ER are permitted to self-archive the submitted (preprint) version of the article at any time, and may self-archive the accepted (peer-reviewed) version after a 24-month embargo period. Self-archiving is often referred to as Green Open Access. The final version of record may be shared within private research collaboration groups including those on "Scholarly Communication Networks (SCNs)" which have signed up to the STM sharing principles (STM, 2015). These private groups must be formed by invitation for a specific research purpose and be of a size that is typical for research groups within the discipline. Sharing of articles must be limited to members of the group only. Speaking metaphorically, both Open Access and COVID-19 have invaded our lives without prior consent or permission. They share a lot in common in terms of showcasing stubborn resilience and indifference to national borders and affecting large communities around the globe. Of course, COVID-19 has affected the entire humanity, and Open Access has been more restricted in terms of having implications in the context of the academic community. But, we expect the ramifications of Open Access to also be long-term and far reaching, and change over time the rules of the game and expectations for publication in the academic community. In the same way that countries and human beings across the globe are now adapting to the realities of COVID-19, researchers and scholars will find ways to adapt to the realities and ramifications of Open Access. In fact, we hope and call on all scholars to strive in the realms of their specific countries and institutions to embrace Open Access given the advantages identified in this editorial relating to wider readership and circulation, and more efficient knowledge building and dissemination. In relation to COVID-19, we encourage our readers to reflect on the positive and resilient aspects we can derive from the pandemic's massive disruption to our day-to-day lives and their potential implications for business ethics and social responsibility. We hope to see how these two new trends will affect our lives over the next decade or two, but this editorial was intended to provide "food for thought," and to entice researchers, scholars, and our readers in general to think actively about those two issues or trends that have proven to be of global interest and concern.
Questionnaire-based consumer research was conducted in Serbia, as a country in a long post-socialist transition. The focus was on consumers' opinions of benefits and attitudes which motivate companies to act in a socially responsible way. Analysis resulted in a division of CSR motives into two main clusters: cluster I-stakeholder and value-driven motives, and cluster II-egoistic motives, performance, and market-driven motives. The division obviously concerned motives which were the socialist legacy (endogenous motives in cluster I), and motives imported from open market economies (exogenous motives in cluster II). Consumers' perceptions are significantly different for endogenous and exogenous CSR motives. Exogenous motives are perceived as principal companies' motives to practice CSR, but there are no significant correlations between the perception of these motives and consumers' purchase decisions. Endogenous, value, and stakeholder-driven motives are perceived in a significantly lower degree as CSR motivators with highly divided consumers' opinions and female consumers rating them significantly higher. Consumers' purchase decisions are in a statistically significant positive correlation with attribution of endogenous, value, and stakeholders' needs-driven motives.
While business as a social activity has involved communities of persons embedded in dense relational networks and practices for thousands of years, the modern legal, theoretical psychological, and moral foundations of business have progressively narrowed our understanding of practical wisdom. Although practical wisdom has recently regained ground in business ethics and management studies, thanks mainly to Anscombe's recovery of virtue ethics, Anscombe herself once observed that it lacks, and has even neglected, a moral psychology that genuinely complements the nuanced philosophical perspective of a virtue-centered moral philosophy. Herein, we offer one way to fill this gap by suggesting two opposing psychological paradigms, namely the inter-processual self and the autonomous self, which are classified according to the assumptions they make about the self, human agency and action more broadly, as well as how they relate to practical wisdom. Upon presenting these moral psychologies, we will bring this proposal into conversation with business ethics to show how the IPS paradigm can enable and support virtuous management.
We would like to take the opportunity of the first issue of this new volume 29 of Business Ethics: A European Review to introduce ourselves as the new editorial team. As a group of co-editors, we combine different regions, different career stages, and different sets of research interests, which in our view is highly suitable for an outlet such as BE:ER. Our explicit aim is to continue Professor Dima Jamali's excellent work, and we are very pleased that she will continue to be part of our team in tandem with serving her nation as a member of parliament. This will allow us to ensure continuity and to build on the recent incontestable success trajectory of BE:ER: over the last five years, its Impact Factor has grown more than sixfold to now 2.9 (2018), and the number of submissions has amplified steadily to over 300 per year, while keeping a rejection rate ranging between 7% and 13%. This upward trajectory of BE:ER also means that we are currently in a pivotal phase. The increasing recognition and impact factor of the journal will need to be reflected in the main journal rankings in order to be on a par with leading journals in the field. As part of our strategic initiatives, the editorial team will be submitting applications with various journal ranking entities this year and in the following years to petition for new classifications. For those of you unfamiliar, the journal ranking process is an episodic or rather cyclic one for various journal lists which for us has resulted in a discrepancy between our increasingly growing reputation with scholars, authors, and as indicated by our impact factor as compared to our current classification on lists. From an operational perspective, the increasing number of submissions is putting pressure on the journal. We are using this period of rapid growth and transition to develop editorial processes that help us to fully adhere to our aims and scope, to streamline editorial decision making and to firmly establish a constructive, inclusive, and developmental review process. All of these aspects are far from trivial for a journal such as BE:ER given its broad remit and interdisciplinary character. Our vision is to turn these challenges into opportunities, and the move to a co-editor model will allow us to increase operational and strategic capacity in order to address a number of short- and longer-term initiatives. We are currently in the process of updating our aims and scope and we would like to formalize what we have already been trying to do in the past, in particular with regard to the scope of contributions and the developmental character of the BE:ER review process. Looking at the scope of BE:ER, we continue to invite contributions that address the decision making of moral actors and their implications at the individual (micro) level, organizational (meso) level, and the societal (macro) level as well as cross fertilization with core business functional areas (e.g., Management, Marketing, Governance, Entrepreneurship, International Business, and Human Resources). With an increased focus on the societal role of business in the recent period, BE:ER is also keen to attract innovative scholarship pertaining to both enduring and emerging topics such as Sustainability, Corporate Social Responsibility, Social Entrepreneurship, Family Business, and Public Policy and of course all relevant intersections with core functional business areas. While BE:ER has already been open to these types of contributions, we feel the need to make this even more explicit to the academic community. The journal continues to be open to all methodological approaches, including conceptual, quantitative, and qualitative articles. The recent proliferation of Qualitative Comparative Analysis as a research method also allows the investigation of new causal recipes in our field and we are keen to attract such papers to BE:ER. Regarding the developmental character of the journal, our vision is for BE:ER to be seen as a well-established academic research journal that is known for its rigor and quality, yet remaining at the same time accessible and readable for a wide range of academic and practitioner audiences. This is why, we have been emphasizing, and will continue to stress on, proper theory building and argumentation. At the same time, the editorial team is keen on positioning BE:ER as a developmental journal in terms of supporting a collegial and constructive peer-review process, and as a journal that is open to capturing under-represented views and voices across the world. While remaining open to all kinds of scholarship from across continents, we are increasingly keen on presenting constructive developmental reviews to our authors, particularly those who come from developing or under-developed contexts. BE:ER has already built a strong pool of Associate Editors from across the globe, which we will continue to grow to enhance subject matter, methodological, and disciplinary expertise. Aside from exploring and working systematically on journal rankings for the next phase, the new editorial team has envisioned a bundle of strategic priorities for BE:ER for the coming year, including an active supportive social media campaign, a best paper award, a best reviewer award, and a lasting impact paper award. We are also working actively to make sure to have a presence at major conferences through these awards but also through PhD and young scholar support workshops. Moreover, we are in active consultation with the editorial support team to potentially change the name of BE:ER to be more reflective of the actual nature and content of our publications rather than a simple delimitation of geographical scope. Thus, while keen to retain the popular acronym BE:ER, we would like to see a change in title to Business Ethics: Environment and Responsibility, so please stay tuned as we are waiting for concrete confirmation that this is in fact feasible. We feel confident that these new strategic initiatives and the new blood in the editorial team will go a long way in terms of reinvigorating visible operational and strategic improvements for the journal and will reflect positively on the journal and its authorship and readership more broadly. There is a lot of work to be done, and we would like to emphasize that we are very open for suggestions and new ideas, such as special issues, editorial suggestions, new subjects that fit within our broad scope—please do get in touch with us if you would like to help us moving BE:ER forward! We are excited about this new phase of BE:ER and are very much looking forward to be working with you in various roles whether you are a prospective author, a member of our editorial team or board, or professional societies focused on business ethics, the environment and sustainability, or responsibility domains. Our ambition is high, and so are your expectations and aspirations. We know that by joining hands and working together, we can make BE:ER the premier outlet in the areas of business ethics and social responsibility.
This paper investigates how analyst categorisation hierarchies (CH) affect corporate social responsibility (CSR) conformity. We argue that firms that are labelled as either high rank or low rank by analysts have higher institutional immunity, while firms that are categorised as middle rank have lower immunity. These heterogeneous institutional immunities will affect the levels of CSR conformity differently. Our results, which originate from a sample of Chinese listed firms from 2009 to 2016, suggest that CH exhibit an inverted-U-shaped relationship with CSR conformity. High-ranked and low-ranked firms are most likely to be CSR nonconformist, while middle-ranked firms tend to conduct CSR like the majority of their industry peers. Moreover, we also investigate the environmental boundary conditions of this curvilinear relationship. This relationship is moderated by environmental munificence (positively) and dynamism (negatively). Our findings fill the theoretical gap by proposing an institutional-based explanation for the CSR conformity heterogeneity which is rarely discussed and extending the boundary conditions for the categorisation-CSR conformity relationship.
The recent deluge of sexual harassment allegations in the media serves as a reminder that sexual harassment remains a pervasive, destructive occurrence in the workplace. Organizations in the United States have taken a legal-centric approach to managing workplace sexual harassment, resulting in impotent anti-harassment policies, ineffective sexual harassment training, and underused reporting mechanisms. In this conceptual paper, I argue that men's differential perceptions of sociosexual behaviors have propagated this legal-centric approach, which fails to meet organizations' ethical obligation to provide a safe and healthy work environment. Specifically, men have a different psychological experience of sexual harassment, which may inhibit their ability to take the perspective of targets. This lack of perspective-taking has influenced the jurisprudence on workplace sexual harassment, which has in turn informed organizations' approach to managing the phenomenon. I contribute to research on both business ethics and workplace sexual harassment by integrating two bodies of scholarship that have developed largely independent of one another: organizational psychology and legal. In so doing, I offer an explanation for the continued pervasiveness of workplace sexual harassment despite decades of legal sanction, organizational interventions, and research.
Business Ethics: A European ReviewVolume 29, Issue S1 p. 1-5 SPECIAL ISSUE Practicing management wisely Matthias P. Hühn, Corresponding Author Matthias P. Hühn matthias.huehn@stvincent.edu orcid.org/0000-0001-9403-1438 Alex G. McKenna School of Business, Economics and Government, Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, PA, USA Correspondence Matthias P. Hühn, Saint Vincent College, 300 Fraser Purchase Road, Latrobe, PA 15650-2667, USA. Email: matthias.huehn@stvincent.eduSearch for more papers by this authorAndré Habisch, André Habisch orcid.org/0000-0002-7188-1357 Business and Economic Department, Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Ingolstadt, GermanySearch for more papers by this authorEdwin M. Hartman, Edwin M. Hartman NYU Stern School of Business, New York, NY, USASearch for more papers by this authorAlejo José G. Sison, Alejo José G. Sison School of Economics and Business Administration, University of Navarre, Pamplona, SpainSearch for more papers by this author Matthias P. Hühn, Corresponding Author Matthias P. Hühn matthias.huehn@stvincent.edu orcid.org/0000-0001-9403-1438 Alex G. McKenna School of Business, Economics and Government, Saint Vincent College, Latrobe, PA, USA Correspondence Matthias P. Hühn, Saint Vincent College, 300 Fraser Purchase Road, Latrobe, PA 15650-2667, USA. Email: matthias.huehn@stvincent.eduSearch for more papers by this authorAndré Habisch, André Habisch orcid.org/0000-0002-7188-1357 Business and Economic Department, Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt, Ingolstadt, GermanySearch for more papers by this authorEdwin M. Hartman, Edwin M. Hartman NYU Stern School of Business, New York, NY, USASearch for more papers by this authorAlejo José G. Sison, Alejo José G. Sison School of Economics and Business Administration, University of Navarre, Pamplona, SpainSearch for more papers by this author First published: 24 October 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12321Citations: 1Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume29, IssueS1Special Issue: Practicing Management WiselyDecember 2020Pages 1-5 RelatedInformation
Business is frequently criticized for not taking social and environmental responsibility. Large companies respond with CSR activities and some also with formulating justifications for their actions. This could indicate that business opens up to the criticism. I do, however, not observe such openness in the current study, but how companies use "CSR justifications" to fend off criticism. While companies use justifications as tool for creating legitimacy, I distinguish five justification fallacies. These failures in dealing with criticism cause a marginalisation of criticism, society, and environment. The fallacies found are neglecting criticism, shareholder primacy, organisation-centricity, conflict avoidance, and progressivism. I contribute to the use of Habermasian ethics in the business ethics literature by showing how CSR justifications could play a part in a rational discourse. The concept justification fallacy, and the five fallacies can provide a framework for analysing corporate rhetoric more generally. Managers have fundamental difficulties in handling ethics and do not reflect on their reasons for working with CSR. They should be more careful when formulating justifications. In our situation of increasing affective polarisation, business needs to be more constructive than merely to marginalise criticism.
After the approval of a code of ethics, the creation of a permanent board-level ethics committee is the next step in the institutionalization of business ethics. This study explores how the board's structure and demographic characteristics explain the decision to form an ethics committee. The analysis is based on the constituents of the Standard and Poor's Europe 350 index. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that ethics committees are more likely to be found in firms with a lower presence of executive directors and of directors holding MBA degrees. However, we also observe that boards chaired by executive directors seem to favor the creation of an ethics committee. Additionally, as we had anticipated, firms with stronger agency conflicts seem to be more willing to create committees. The analysis conducted with segmented samples reveals that the model has greater explanatory power when applied to firms from common-law and French civil-law countries than when applied to firms from the German-Scandinavian civil-law area. Finally, our results indicate that a firm's country of origin is a more influential factor in explaining the decision to create an ethics committee than the industry to which it belongs or even the magnitude of its agency conflicts.
The paper is one of the first empirical attempts that builds on the moral dilemmas and group rationality literature to explore the way in which group composition with respect to group members’ individual choices in moral dilemmas and social influence processes impact on group moral choices. First individually and then, in small groups, 221 participants were asked to decide on 10 moral dilemmas. Our results show that emergent group level utilitarianism is higher than the average individual utilitarianism, yet, lower than the highest individual utilitarianism within groups. We also show that average individual utilitarianism positively predicts group utilitarianism while group fragmentation in individual utilitarianism has a negative effect on group utilitarianism. Next to group composition, minority influence processes explain additional variance in group utilitarianism, cognitive dissent having a positive influence, while normative deviance a negative influence on group utilitarianism. Majority influence has no significant influence on group utilitarianism. Finally, our results show that the relationship between group fragmentation in individual utilitarianism and emergent group utilitarianism is mediated by the two forms of minority influence.
Firm managers play an important role in the implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions. Education is emerging as the key factor in developing a sense of moral responsibility amongst the business students who will eventually become company managers and decision makers. The aim of this research is, thus, twofold. First, to analyze the existence of a direct positive correlation between university students' perception of CSR and its impact on business performance; and second, to examine the extent to which two factors (advantages brought by CSR and responsibilities toward stakeholders) act as mediation variables in the aforementioned correlation. The analysis was performed with a sample of 390 business-related university students. Amongst the potential contributions made by this study we can highlight the possibility of knowing future managers' way of thinking and of knowing the aspects where educational centers might improve their CSR teaching.
Research on organizational justice demonstrates its consistent effect on employee organization-based self-esteem. However, little research considers how organizational justice affects employee organization-based self-esteem and when the relationship is attenuated. In an effort to extend the research regarding this particular relationship, we draw on social cognitive theory to suggest that supervisors' perceptions of overall organizational justice trickle down to impact employees' organization-based self-esteem. Specifically, we propose that supervisory ethical leadership mediates this relationship. We also examine the moderating influence of supervisor conscientiousness on this proposed trickle-down effect. We analyze these relationships in a multisource field study and find support for the mediating effect of supervisory ethical leadership and the proposed moderated mediation model. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
