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).
