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Insuring that ethical action remains a vibrant aspect of an organization's climate and culture is an ongoing challenge for those responsible for training and development. To better understand what best practices are being utilized today, eight organizations in the Silicon Valley region of the United States were studied. Findings suggest that ethics training is particularly intensive when an employee is first hired, when rules, regulations and corporate values are shared during the indoctrination period. Training continues, but is often limited to online activities. Face-to-face interaction, necessary for learning and development, is usually reserved for specialized functions and senior level managers. Most firms emphasize a compliance-based approach, with little attention directed toward developing moral competencies over time. In addition, assessment tools to measure ethical competencies are rarely used as performance criteria. Findings from this study reveal specific trends, which can inform, guide and improve practitioners' efforts to further develop ethical decision-making and action within their organizations.

Thematic analysis of critical incidents interviews with 13 physician coaches yielded two orientations to coaching: reflection/teaching coaches focused on others and described positive encounters experienced in coaching; personal learning and change coaches identified more personal benefits from the experience. (Contains 31 references.) (SK)

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8608.2007.00484.x Byline: Leslie E. Sekerka ([dagger]), Richard P. Bagozzi (*) Author Affiliation: (*)Respectively: Assistant Professor, Organizational Behavior and Ethics, Graduate School of Business & Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA ([dagger])Professor of Marketing, Stephen M. Ross School of Business & Professor of Social and Administrative Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, MI, USA.

Ethical consumption involves people making decisions that strive to reduce environmental or social harms. This stands in stark contrast to typical frameworks advanced in business school settings, in fields like economics. "More is better" is a standard outcome goal that has analytical appeal. Temptation, a natural force tending to circumvent ethical consumption, is typically excluded by assumptions of economic rationality. The drive to succeed is often structured around creating demand. We argue that if ethical consumption is to be more widely habituated throughout the global economy, it must be woven into the fabric of business education via a multiple disciplinary approach. To initiate this idea, we use a critical incident inquiry approach among business students to prompt their awareness of ethical consumption and to illustrate how their current thinking and behavior may not reflect their assumed moral identity. Insights are presented for how to better integrate ethical consumption in business education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors are deemed important in corporate value creation, yet their inclusion in performance is often predicated on regulatory demands. While a stakeholder perspective is advocated, business leaders and investors are uncertain about its genuine viability. With a lack of coherency to track ESG dimensions across industry sectors, barriers to clarity and transparency present challenges for sustained moral performance. We examine these concerns and offer a way forward, focusing on impact investing as the centerpiece to prompt systemic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflicts of interest represent an increasing problem in organizations, given the expansion of stakeholder concerns, needs, and expectations. Existing remedies to address these conflicts largely involve aligning management incentives with the interests of investors, or recusing parties with special interests from the decision-making effort. Both focus on a dyad between the primary stakeholder and the decision-maker. However, increasingly complex situations involving multiple stakeholders exist. The added complexity of considering multiple stakeholders heightens uncertainty that can facilitate the pursuit of self-interest. Ironically, a potential remedy may involve ensuring the presence of competing interests. A review of military procurement suggests that competing interests can mitigate self-interest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on an inward drive and commitment toward ethical discovery, which the authors refer to as the competency of moral curiosity. When directed toward moral decision making, the authors believe this ability can help managers effectively respond to their ethical challenges and contribute to an organizational environment that supports ethical performance. Design/methodology/approach – After presenting insights from the literature on curiosity and establishing its relevance, the authors describe a specific experiential learning tool designed to cultivate moral curiosity in organizational settings. The authors conduct a field study using this process to explore how moral curiosity can be strengthened through experiential practice. Findings – Results from the field study suggest that engagement in balanced experiential inquiry, a process that asks managers to reflect on their salient ethical dilemmas and then engage in both individual and collective meaning making, positively influenced participants’ curiosity toward moral decision making. Research limitations/implications – Limitations include challenges inherent to the field-study design, including lack of a control group and limited ability to predict long-term impacts of the intervention. Despite these concerns, the study has useful implications for managerial training and development. In particular, providing safe spaces where managers can discuss their ethical dilemmas is an important element of supporting their development into morally curious leaders who are interested in pursuing business ethics. Practical implications – Findings suggest that providing safe spaces where managers can discuss their ethical dilemmas is an important element of supporting their development into morally curious leaders who are interested in pursuing business ethics. Originality/value – The paper contributes to the research literature on ethics training and education for managers. The authors introduce the construct of moral curiosity as a competency that can be developed through experiential practice in organizational settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This article aims to draw insight from a variety of management disciplines to encourage a broader view of the economy as it relates to sustainable waste management (SWM) development. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a framework to describe how strengths can be blended to support environmental sustainability (ES), highlighting the need for community cooperation between the informal and formal sectors of the economy. Findings – Unique contributions for SWM can emerge from both economic sectors and, when leveraged, may drive community development within local municipalities. Practical implications – The platform addresses the need for more flexible governmental policies that encourage waste management activities among formal and informal workers. Originality/value – The paper brings forward typically disregarded ES waste management opportunities that reside within the informal sector, an often overlooked aspect of the broader economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managers in transnational corporations (TNCs) must learn to conceptualize and apply alternative decision-making frameworks given their stakeholders may hold divergent viewpoints. We consider how cultural norms associated with kinship bonds can influence a person's desire and decision to engage in ethical action. Propositions are set forth to explain how a classic ethical decision-making model may be interpreted from a tribal-collectivistic or individualistic perspective. Cultural differences, leveraged as comparative advantages, can generate a competitive edge. Examples related to the Middle East are provided and practical suggestions for managerial training are presented. The goal is to advance ethical awareness, via cultural sensitivity and inclusivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Patience is underestimated in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of patience and the individual and organizational benefits it confers. Then, the paper discuses emotional self-regulation and explain how two self-regulatory techniques can affect the patience of individuals in organizations. Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers religious, philosophical, and psychological perspectives on patience; and highlight the emotional underpinnings of patience. Findings – The paper argues that patience plays an important role in organizations and that individuals can use emotional self-regulation to enhance their patience. The paper offers two key points about the relationship between self-regulation strategies and patience: first, situation selection mitigates the need for patience and second cognitive reappraisal facilitates the execution of patient responses and the development of the virtue itself. Practical implications – The paper provides recommendations for increasing individuals’ patience in organizational settings. Originality/value – The virtue of patience has received scant research attention. This paper focusses on the importance of patience in the workplace and examines how emotional self-regulation can facilitate its activation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What drives the decision to act with virtue when one faces an ethical challenge? Events occurring in social interactions pose moral queries that drive people to respond with ethical strength, or to turn away. To understand the role of values in motivating morally responsible behavior, we identify military managers’ reasons for action when faced with a wartime moral dilemma. We employ qualitative methods to reveal a network of interconnected values, reflecting inferences between them and paths serving as motivations for action. Our approach unpacks what lies behind values that drive virtuous decisions, which we test quantitatively. The laddering technique we employ also serves as a tool, shedding light on the cognitive backstage of ethical decision making. Helping managers become aware of their tacit assumptions will be useful to augment ethics training and management practice. Implications and suggestions for additional research are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If people expect organizations to care for the natural environment, leaders in public affairs need to better understand how and why firms move to engage in sustainable enterprise. We broach this issue as an ethical challenge and present a theoretical framework to explain the path to environmental sustainability decision-making (ESDM). Standard ethics and economic decision-making models inform our work, yet we also incorporate a non-rational element, allowing us to draw insight from psychology and organizational behavior. This view reflects the holistic nature of ESDM, an effort driven by both conscious and non-conscious elements. Our work edifies sustainable development theory by presenting ESDM in the context of collective moral emotions, which serve as underlying motivators of ideas and feelings. We add granularity to prior models, describing how this affective force can influence an organization's progression along the ESDM path. In moving to achieve sustainability goals that affect stakeholders, we explain how negative sentiments may impose drag and how positive sentiments may compel lift toward environmental sustainability action. These paths can contribute to worthwhile, yet different, forms of change. Awareness of the ESDM framework will help public affairs establish more congruent communication, processes, and policies, working to reduce uncertainty and encouraging the need for more explicit internal self-regulation. By synthesizing concepts, we create a coherent and useful picture, one that can give public affairs access to these ideas and help them find useful ways to apply them. Implications suggest leveraging strengths from affective forces may be a useful means to encourage actions that protect the natural environment. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of ethical corrosion, reflecting that moral courage is required for achieving principled business performance. It depicts several factors which could help to explain the concept of ethical corrosion including leveraging of issues regarding lack of ethical durability, prior research in social psychology, and organizational behavior. It discusses moral courage study for identifying the specific moral competencies involved in professional moral courage (PMC).

Much has been written about affecting change in the workplace, including how to help employees prepare for the process. However, little is known about how participation influences employees' emotions and attitudes at the start of an intervention. By qualitatively analyzing conversations that were triggered by an organizational change effort, we explored how different inquiry strategies influence readiness for change. We examined four inquiry strategies by combining strength or deficit frames with individual or organizational focus. Distinctive conversational patterns emerged within each strategy, which we believe influence peoples' change readiness. In this article we present four readiness modes to describe these patterns and conclude with implications for managers who seek to shape their change efforts more effectively.Organization Management Journal (2009) 6, 106–122. doi:10.1057/omj.2009.15 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors are deemed important in corporate value creation, yet their inclusion in performance is often predicated on regulatory demands. While a stakeholder perspective is advocated, business leaders and investors are uncertain about its genuine viability. With a lack of coherency to track ESG dimensions across industry sectors, barriers to clarity and transparency present challenges for sustained moral performance. We examine these concerns and offer a way forward, focusing on impact investing as the centerpiece to prompt systemic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethical consumption involves people making decisions that strive to reduce environmental or social harms. This stands in stark contrast to typical frameworks advanced in business school settings, in fields like economics. "More is better" is a standard outcome goal that has analytical appeal. Temptation, a natural force tending to circumvent ethical consumption, is typically excluded by assumptions of economic rationality. The drive to succeed is often structured around creating demand. We argue that if ethical consumption is to be more widely habituated throughout the global economy, it must be woven into the fabric of business education via a multiple disciplinary approach. To initiate this idea, we use a critical incident inquiry approach among business students to prompt their awareness of ethical consumption and to illustrate how their current thinking and behavior may not reflect their assumed moral identity. Insights are presented for how to better integrate ethical consumption in business education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increased pressure to perform, fewer resources, and more regulation, employees may justify a lack of compliance by calling it rule-bending rather than rule-breaking. The present study addresses this concern by analyzing situations where personnel decide to bend the rules, including an examination of motives, prudential judgment, and perceived threat to the organization. Qualitative analysis shows that when rule-bending was considered necessary, the perceived threat of this behavior to the organization was reduced, except when officials applied prudential judgment in their decision-making. Implications and future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]