Ideal Moral Beliefs and Real Moral Behavior: Understanding Moral Reasoning in Adult Female Volunteer Leaders

Abstract

Moral decision making during dilemmas has become a concern for organizational leaders and stakeholders, as well as society. The purpose of this non-experimental, mixed method, multiple case study was to explore the moral decision making of adult female volunteer leaders associated with a youth leadership development organization in western Virginia to understand how and why their idealistic moral beliefs and intentions translated into behaviors in the real world. The quantitative data relied upon Rest‘s moral development schemas: personal interests, maintaining norms, and postconventional. Most participants were consolidated in the maintaining norms moral development schema. Six major themes and two minor themes emerged from coding and analysis of the qualitative interviews. Suggestions for leaders and stakeholders include taking time to understand the volunteer decisions, maintaining good interpersonal relations with the volunteer, providing safe systems for volunteers to report ethical violations, valuing quality versus quantity in volunteer recruitment and retention, and mitigating ethical problems in the workplace to minimize the consequences of unethical/immoral behavior.