Abstract
AbstractResearch on behavioral ethics is thriving and intends to offer advice that can be used by practitioners to improve the practice of ethics management. However, three barriers prevent this research from generating genuinely useful advice. It does not sufficiently focus on interventions that can be directly designed by management. The typical research designs used in behavioral ethics research require such a reduction of complexity that the resulting findings are not very useful for practitioners. Worse still, attempts to make behavioral ethics research more useful by formulating simple recommendations are potentially very damaging. In response to these limitations, this article proposes to complement the current behavioral ethics research agenda that takes an ‘explanatory science’ approach with a research agenda that uses a ‘design science’ approach. Proposed by Joan van Aken and building on earlier work by Herbert Simon, this approach aims to develop field-tested ‘design propositions’ that present often complex but useful recommendations for practitioners. Using a ‘CIMO-logic’, these propositions specify how an ‘intervention’ can generate very different ‘outcomes’ through various ‘mechanisms’, depending on the ‘context’. An illustration and a discussion of the contours of this new research agenda for ethics management demonstrate its advantages as well as its feasibility. The article concludes with a reflection on the feasibility of embracing complexity without drowning in a sea of complicated contingencies and without being paralyzed by the awareness that all interventions can have both desirable and undesirable effects.
Highlights
In response to calls from society following highprofile scandals, research on ethics in organizations has flourished in the last two decades
With “bounded ethicality” as one of its core concepts, behavioral ethics draws from the seminal work of Herbert Simon on the bounded rationality of decision making (Simon, 1957)
This article proposed to complement the current behavioral ethics research agenda with a design science research agenda aimed at generating design propositions that are useful for ethics practitioners
Summary
In response to calls from society following highprofile scandals, research on ethics in organizations has flourished in the last two decades. 7106) concluded with the recommendation “that practitioners take this finding out of their intervention “tool-kit” as it is unlikely to increase honesty” While this is an uplifting example of the self-reflective capacity of the explanatory approach to science, it is an example of the risks of attempting to generate ‘quick fixes’ from experimental research. When failure eventually comes, this might undermine practitioners’ trust in the very possibility of using research to improve ethics management To some extent, these barriers to usability can be addressed within the explanatory science approach to behavioral ethics. The first barrier can be addressed by stimulating researchers to focus on explanatory variables that can be directly manipulated by management While helpful, this will still generate generic recommendations about standardized interventions, not the creative context-sensitive solutions that can be produced by design science’s reflective cycle (see below). As the section will argue, the design science approach instead allows researchers to make genuinely useful recommendations without having to produce unfounded and potentially damaging proverbs
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