Business Ethics Research Research Articles

Are Good Deeds Rewarded?—The Impact of Traditional Morality and Modern Responsibility on Green Innovation

The essence of intergenerational sustainability emphasizes the necessity of incorporating altruistic thinking and culture. While prior studies primarily examined corporate innovation strategies from a self-interested lens, this paper aims to investigate the drivers of corporate green innovation from an altruistic perspective. Analyzing a sample of Chinese A-share listed companies from 2011 to 2019, we employ both the OLS model and the mediation effect model to explore how traditional morality and modern responsibility impact corporate green innovation, as well as the mechanisms underlying this relationship. Our findings reveal that both traditional morality and modern responsibility significantly enhance corporate green management innovation, with social trust serving as a key mediating factor. Furthermore, traditional morality and modern responsibility play distinctive roles depending on the stage of economic development: traditional morality primarily influences green innovation in the early stages of economic development, whereas modern responsibility becomes more influential as development progresses. This study provides meaningful insights for research and practice in corporate sustainability, business ethics, and innovation strategy.

Mitigating Investor Reactions to Financial Misconduct: The Moderating Roles of Firm Commitment Cues

AbstractCorporate financial misconduct has garnered increased interest in business ethics research. Although prior research has provided insights into the consequences of financial misconduct, our understanding of why investors react differently to similar instances of misconduct, especially in emerging markets, remains limited. In this study, we first argue that direct information on the severity of misconduct is the primary basis for investors’ evaluations. Next, drawing on screening theory, we theorize that in contexts characterized by high information asymmetry, indirect information about existing firm commitment cues plays a vital screening role by demonstrating the firm’s legitimacy and capability. Subsequently, we develop a tripod framework that integrates the social, market, and strategy dimensions as firm commitment cues that serve as fundamental screening mechanisms to mitigate the adverse effect of misconduct severity on investor reactions. We use a sample of 344 Chinese listed firms that engaged in financial misconduct during 2009–2019 and find that greater misconduct severity results in more negative investor reactions. However, this negative relationship is weakened when the firm demonstrates stronger social and strategy commitments but not stronger market commitment.

Are Employees Safer When the CEO Looks Greedy?

AbstractIn this study, we explore the relationship between perceived CEO greed and workplace safety. Drawing on insights from the social psychology literature, we theorize that CEOs are cognizant that their perceived greed has implications for how observers respond to failures in workplace safety. Our theorizing points to a somewhat counterintuitive positive relationship between perceived CEO greed and workplace safety. Consistent with our theorizing, we find that the relationship is attenuated when the CEO is insulated from how observers respond to firm conduct and is amplified when the CEO’s characteristics have a larger impact on how observers respond to adverse firm-level events. We contribute to business ethics research on executive greed, on the relationship between CEO traits and (ir)responsible corporate conduct, and on the antecedents of workplace safety.

Mrs. Dalloway and the Shecession: The Interconnectedness and Intersectionalities of Care Ethics and Social Time During the Pandemic

Business ethics researchers and practitioners are interested in understanding the temporal mechanisms of various managerial activities, processes, and policies. In this direction, I borrow notions of time from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to examine how social time intersperses with the paid and (unpaid) care work of female employees during the pandemic. I explore how discussions of social time in connection to care work appear in newspaper discourses of “shecession”, i.e. the large-scale job/income losses experienced by women during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since shecession is a byproduct of the pandemic times, exploring the role of time in it is crucial. In fact, my findings show that the macro social time of the pandemic affects working women with care responsibilities who are situated at the intersection of multiple vulnerable social categories by simultaneously being a penalizer and a lost opportunity. Similarly, I also find that the micro social times of working women embed, stratify, and synchronize differently during the pandemic when compared to normal times. Working women with care responsibilities are thus adversely affected by both micro and macro social time changes. My findings, therefore, could be instrumental in developing and implementing inclusive policies and processes in business organizations and labor markets. In so doing, my study also indicates how a consideration of social time enriches the application of care ethics in work contexts. Ultimately, this article is also about developing caring organizations, societies, and families which care for the caregivers (working women), since receiving care is a precondition of giving care.

Do Political Connections Help or Harm Family Firms? An Audit Pricing Perspective

Past business ethics research highlights negative perceptions about corporate governance of family firms, and yet many auditors evaluate family businesses favorably and charge them lower audit fees; however, this inconsistency remains unexplained. Moreover, the impact of family firms’ political connections and board gender diversity on audit fees is still not clear. Based on the data from listed Chinese family firms, we address these important research gaps by using the local institutional environment in which the client operates as a moderator of the process by which auditors assess the implications of clients’ political connections. Political connections reduce audit fees when a client is located in a region with high-quality public administration. Female representation in audit committees positively moderates the relationship between political connections and audit fees, as female committee members react to their firms’ political connections by demanding higher levels of assurance from auditors. Female committee members also demand higher audit efforts for family firms managed by non–family-member CEOs.

Toward Humanistic Business Ethics

We theorize that, in the current development of business ethics, there is a fruitful evolution that dissolves the dichotomy between the normative and behavioral research approaches developed, respectively, by philosophers and social scientists; this approach avoids many of the limitations originated by such distinction by reconnecting their two separate narratives. We call this emerging research model Humanistic Business Ethics (HBE) as it emphasizes the centrality of the human dimension of business and the importance of adopting a richer concept of humanity in business ethics research. We argue that this specific research model in business ethics emerges when scholars combine a pragmatist philosophical approach with some key ideas coming from stakeholder theory, which we summarize and connect. By leveraging collaboration across ethics, economics, psychology, and entrepreneurship, HBE can help business and society scholars undertake fruitful inquiries into the way business works (and should work) at its best.

Ethical Reasoning at Work: A Cross-Country Comparison of Gender and Age Differences

This paper uses the IBE Ethics at Work 2018 survey to explore employees’ ethical reasoning and examine gender and age differences across 12 countries. Debates about gender and ethics have been intense since Kohlberg’s theory of moral development, with feminist critiques from Gilligan and others advocating the different voice of women, while the recent arrival of Millennials in the workplace has raised new questions about age/generational differences and ethics. The findings in this study suggest that women and older workers have stronger ethical judgments in the workplace than men and younger workers. These gender and age differences, both among employees and managers, are consistent across countries. This study shows that individual characteristics are important for employees’ ethical reasoning, which affects their ability to make ethical decisions and act ethically. Business ethics research should therefore take greater account of differences between (groups of) employees and their learning needs when examining the effectiveness of ethics policies and instruments, while organizations can improve employee ethical reasoning by adopting diversity-based training programs and ethical leadership.

The More the Merrier: How Psychological Standing and Work Group Size Explain Managers’ Willingness to Communicate About Unethical Conduct in Their Work Group

Business ethics research has long examined the dichotomy between remaining silent or reporting ethical misconduct to a third party. Little is known, however, about ethical conversations within a work group after observing misconduct. Specifically, we do not know how many members of their work group individuals choose to communicate with. These conversations could have important implications for creating an ethical workplace. We propose that psychological standing is an important driver of individuals’ decisions not to remain silent and to instead raise moral concerns with a greater number of others in their work group. In addition, integrating existing work on structural power, psychological standing, and the bystander effect, we develop a moderated mediation model with both structural power position and work group size as contextual drivers of psychological standing. Our model is supported across four studies using different designs and methodological approaches. Our results contribute to the understanding of when and why individuals raise moral concerns, and they provide insights into how an ethical context is created in organizations.

To behave or not to behave ethically: A question of style?

AbstractWhat makes people behave ethically continues to be at the forefront of business ethics research. The stylistic makeup of the decision‐maker has been suspected to influence individual ethical behavior; however, this body of research accounts only for a handful of studies. This paper investigates the influence of decision‐making styles as an individual difference on unethical behavior, independently from other personal characteristics. Covering a sample of 230 managers, we utilize the preeminent measures of these two constructs in a self‐report survey. Our results suggest that the decision‐making styles of managers do influence their ethical behavior. Whereas managers with a dominant rational or spontaneous style behave ethically, having a more intuitive or avoidant makes them behave less ethically. The results also reveal that with higher levels of education, managers become more unethical. This research conveys important implications for management practice, education, and training.

Publishing Big Data research in Business Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility: Advice for authors

Publishing Big Data research in Business Ethics, the Environment and Responsibility: Advice for authors

Ethical Research in Business Ethics

In this editorial essay, we argue that business ethics research should be aware of the ethical implications of its own methodological choices, and that these implications include, but go beyond, mere compliance with standardized ethical norms. Methodological choices should be made specifically with reference to their effects on the world, both within and outside the academy. Awareness of these effects takes researchers beyond assuring ethics in their methods to more fully consider the ethics of their methods as knowledge practices that have broader institutional consequences. Drawing from examples in published research, we examine five ways in which authors can formulate their methodological approaches with purpose, care and reflexivity.

Aquinas’s Principle of Misericordia in Corporations: Implications for Workers and other Stakeholders

Despite its central position in the history of European and Christian thought on the protection of human dignity, the virtue of mercy is currently a problematic and under-developed concept in business ethics, compared to related ideas of care, compassion or philanthropy. The aim of this article is to argue for its revival as a core principle of ethical business practice. The article is conceptual in method. An overview is provided of the scope of contemporary business ethics research on related topics and clarifies some of the similarities and differences between mercy and popular terms, such as compassion and prosocial behaviour. The question is then explored as to why mercy has so little traction in business ethics. Some of the history of the idea of mercy in European and Anglophone philosophy is discussed, from Anselm and Aquinas to the present day, showing how discourse on mercy came to be split into a wider concept of the prevention and alleviation of suffering (misericordia) and a narrower one of clemency or leniency. Aquinas’s wide concept of the virtue of misericordia is developed as the basis for a principle of mercy, which is applicable directly to corporations. The practical implications of this for standards of corporate behaviour towards employees and other stakeholders are then considered through the introduction of a ‘vulnerability grid’. The grid offers a critical contrast to other analysis tools, such as stakeholder power-interest matrices. Cases drawn from empirical studies are used to illustrate application of the grid and to challenge some common assumptions of stakeholder theory.

Technology, Megatrends and Work: Thoughts on the Future of Business Ethics

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors in chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialogue around the theme Technology, Megatrends and Work. Of all the profound changes in business, technology is perhaps the most ubiquitous. There is not a facet of our lives unaffected by internet technologies and artificial intelligence. The Journal of Business Ethics established a dedicated section that focuses on Technology and Business Ethics, yet issues related to this phenomenon run right through all the sections. Kirsten Martin, editor of the Technology and Business Ethics section, joins our interim social media editor, Hannah Trittin-UIbrich, to advance a human-centric approach to the development and application of digital technologies that places Business Ethics at centre of the analysis. For Shuili Du, technology is the defining condition for a new era of Corporate Social Responsibility—CSR 3.0—which she defines as “a company’s socially responsible strategies and practices that deal with key ethical and socio-technical issues associated with AI and related technologies on the one hand and leverage the power of AI and related technologies to tackle social and environmental problems on the other hand.” It is not just technologies that are a determining feature of our lives but technology companies, an argument made by Glen Whelan as he examines Big Business and the need for a Big Business Ethics as we try to understand the impact of Big Tech on our post-work world. Indeed, as noted by Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz, megatrends in addition to advancement in technologies, namely globalization, the greening of economies, and changes in demographics and migration, are shaping the future for workers in ways previously unimaginable. Contributing to this important debate, Praveen Parboteeah considers the influence of another longstanding but oft overlooked megatrend, the role of religion in the workplace. Given the enormity of the influence of technology and other megatrends in our world, it is not surprising that this essay introduces ground-breaking ideas that speak to the future of business ethics research.

Bringing Excitement to Empirical Business Ethics Research: Thoughts on the Future of Business Ethics

To commemorate 40 years since the founding of the Journal of Business Ethics, the editors-in-chief of the journal have invited the editors to provide commentaries on the future of business ethics. This essay comprises a selection of commentaries aimed at creating dialog around the theme Bringing Excitement to Empirical Business Ethics Research (inspired by the title of the commentary by Babalola and van Gils). These editors, considering the diversity of empirical approaches in business ethics, envisage a future in which quantitative business ethics research is more bold and innovative, as well as reflexive about its techniques, and dialog between quantitative and qualitative research nourishes the enrichment of both. In their commentary, Babalola and van Gils argue that leadership research has stagnated with the use of too narrow a range of perspectives and methods and too many overlapping concepts. They propose that novel insights could be achieved by investigating the lived experience of leadership (through interviews, document analysis, archival data); by focusing on topics of concern to society; by employing different personal, philosophical, or cultural perspectives; and by turning the lens on the heroic leader (through “dark-side” and follower studies). Taking a provocative stance, Bal and Garcia-Lorenzo argue that we need radical voices in current times to enable a better understanding of the psychology underlying ethical transformations. Psychology can support business ethics by not shying away from grander ideas, going beyond the margins of “unethical behaviors harming the organization” and expanding the range of lenses used to studying behavior in context. In the arena of finance and business ethics, Guedhami, Liang, and Shailer emphasize novel data sets and innovative methods. Significantly, they stress that an understanding the intersection of finance and ethics is central to business ethics; financial equality and inclusion are persistent socio-economic and political concerns that are not always framed as ethics issues, yet relevant business policies and practices manifest ethical values. Finally, Charles Cho offers his opinion on the blurry line between the “ethical” versus “social” or “critical” aspects of accounting papers. The Journal of Business Ethics provides fertile ground for innovative, even radical, approaches to quantitative methods (see Zyphur and Pierides in J Bus Ethics 143(1):1–16, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-017-3549-8, 2017), as part of a broad goal of ethically reflecting on empirical research.

Exploring the Diversity and Inclusion-Business Ethics Interface

Different socio-cultural groups may engage with and respond to diversity and inclusion initiatives in different ways. As a result, diversity and inclusion initiatives may actually perpetuate continued inequalities, regardless of the intentions of an organization, raising important question about what diversity and inclusion initiatives should look like. This highlights the critical – but all too often unclear or under recognized – connection between the fields of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and business ethics research. In this presenter symposium, we explore the DEI-business ethics interface via five current projects that clarify this research interface and clarify how different socio-cultural groups of employees engage with or respond to diversity and inclusion initiatives. Diversity and Ethical Outcomes: A Review and Road Map for Future Research Presenter: Sun Young Kim; IESEG School of Management Presenter: Danielle E. Warren; Rutgers U. Presenter: Chao Chen; Rutgers U. Presenter: Katherine Phillips; Columbia Business School Impacting Perceptions of Fit Using LGBT Diversity Signals Presenter: Cody Bradley; U. of Arkansas Presenter: Kristie Joy Neff Moergen; U. of Arkansas, Fayetteville Presenter: Dorothea Roumpi; Pennsylvania State U. Presenter: Lauren Simon; U. of Arkansas Pronoun Disclosure Policies: Promoting Diversity Climate or Causing Moral Outrage? Presenter: Lauren E. Aydinliyim; City U. of New York, Baruch College Presenter: Dorothea Roumpi; Pennsylvania State U. Presenter: Danielle E. Warren; Rutgers U. CEO Gender, Institutional Pressures, and Controversial Diversity Policy Adoption Presenter: Zhaoyi Yan; IE Business School, IE U. Ethical and Tangible: The Dual Benefits of Organizational Racial Diversity Presenter: Sun Young Kim; IESEG School of Management Presenter: Denise Lewin Loyd; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Presenter: Michelle Checketts; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Why Do Organizations Respond Differently When Accused of Historic Crimes?

This paper contributes to the growing literature on corporate historic crimes by challenging the ways of thinking about moral evaluation that have hitherto informed research on this topic. We do so by examining managers’ responses to the ongoing campaign for corporate reparations for slavery. In recent years, social movements such as BLM have called upon the firms that historically profited from African slavery to apologize and pay reparations. We show that these firms have responded in strikingly different ways when confronted by activists who produced irrefutable evidence that they had once profited from slavery. Some of these firms apologising profusely and announced they would spend on restorative justice measures, while other firms facing essentially similar accusations refused to apologize or even comment on the accusation. We explain this difference in response with the Social Intuitionist Model (SIM) of moral reasoning. We find that while part of the observed difference in firm responses can be easily explained by looking at their current business models, firm responses were also strongly influenced by political ideology, a factor largely ignored by the extant literature on historic corporate responsibility. In the model we develop to explain firm responses to accusations of immoral behaviour in the past, a key factor is the nature of the moral universe inhabited by the firm’s managers and stakeholders. When a firm’s core stakeholders and managers inhabit the “moral universe” associated with the present-day Anglo-American left, the firm is much more likely to apologise for its historical connections to racial slavery than if its core stakeholders and managers inhabit the moral universe associated with political conservativism. We identify important implications for business ethics researchers and practitioners.

Exposure to workplace bullying and negative gossip behaviors: Buffering roles of personal and contextual resources

AbstractThis study adds to business ethics research by investigating how employees' exposure to workplace bullying might spur their negative gossip behaviors, as well as how this effect might be buffered by their access to two personal resources (religiosity and innovation propensity) and two contextual resources (work meaningfulness and trust in top management). Survey data collected among Canadian‐based employees who work in the religious sector reveal that workplace bullying increases the likelihood that they spread negative rumors about other organizational members, but this effect is weaker when employees (1) can draw from their religious faith, (2) are motivated to generate innovative ideas, (3) derive meaning from their work, and (4) have confidence in the trustworthiness of top management. For management scholars and practitioners, this study thus pinpoints different resources that diminish the risk that workplace bullying infuses work environments with even more negative energy, as might occur if bullying spills over into additional, negative gossip behaviors.

Diversity, Profit, Control: An Empirical Study of Industry Employees’ Views on Ethics in Private Sector Genomics

Background Large amounts of capital are currently being invested in genomics companies across the “bench to clinic pipeline” – companies which are now shaping the future of biomedicine globally. Understanding the perspectives of people who work in such companies can contribute to shaping this industry in service of just and equitable futures of medicine. Methods Using in-depth interviews as the primary method, this paper analyzes perspectives on ethical and social issues in private sector genomics expressed by members of the commercial genomics industry in the US. Results Interviewees described a wide range of issues as pressing ethical concerns in commercial genomics. Key themes included concerns about diversity in genetic datasets, data governance and control, and pricing and profits in the industry. However, concern about diversity of datasets was not accompanied by expressions of concern about diversity in the industry workforce. Conclusions Most interviewees described concerns in the industry that are rather removed from their own work. But along with this “ethical distancing,” moral concerns appeared to be the basis for competition amongst companies – to attract both employees and customers. Research in business ethics suggests that expanding moral analysis of one’s own work helps improve day to day decision-making in the interest of justice. Opening space for people to examine ethics in their own subsector may provide a means for the private sector genomics industry to become a leader in ethics in the biosciences and a model for equity in our current moment of late capitalism.

Moral attentiveness as a boundary condition: Servant leadership and the impact of supervisor affiliation on pro‐group unethical behavior

AbstractBased on social exchange theory, this research aims to develop and test a model in which supervisor affiliation mediates the impact of servant leadership on employees’ pro‐group unethical behavior a highly competitive intergroup environment. Using a sample of 239 employees from 39 groups in four foreign‐owned engineering enterprises, we found that supervisor affiliation mediated the positive relationship between servant leadership and employees’ pro‐group unethical behavior. Our results also revealed that employees’ moral attentiveness weakened the positive impact of supervisor affiliation on pro‐group unethical behavior. The current study contributes to business ethics research by advancing our understanding of antecedents of pro‐group unethical behavior as well as how servant leadership leads to employees’ unethical behaviors. Implications for theory, practice, and directions for future research are discussed.

Framing evolution and knowledge domain visualization of business ethics research (1975–2019): a large-scale scientometric analysis

Framing evolution and knowledge domain visualization of business ethics research (1975–2019): a large-scale scientometric analysis