Emotions & Ethical Decision Making at Work: How the Rational Tail Wags the Emotional Dog

Abstract

Research within moral psychology and ethics has begun to extensively explore the influence emotion has on ethical decision making. This research indicates that emotions play a pivotal rule in stimulating moral intuition and moral awareness that promote decision making in line with ethical values. The theory developed here argues that emotion’s prominence within ethical decision making can grow problematic within the workplace. This is the case because most organizations retain norms that disfavor the application of strong negative emotions within organizational decision making. As a result, individuals will engage specific emotion regulation strategies such as situation selection, reappraisal and expressive suppression that stifle the experience and expression of emotion in organizational decision making. As a result, individuals often fail to register emotion which then triggers an amoral decision process.