Society for Business Ethics 2024 Annual Meeting

Paper Abstracts: Session 7

Session 7A: Nepotism, Conflicts Of Interest, And Rationalization

• A Qualified Defense Of Nepotism
  • Suppose you own a business. A job open has become available in it. Is it permissible for you to hire your child over a more qualified applicant? To do so would be to engage in nepotism. In this paper I argue that there nothing wrong with nepotism per se, and that it is usually permissible (even admirable) in small family-owned firms. But it can be wrong, and often is wrong in large corporations. I begin the paper by clearing away a misguided objection to nepotism. I then consider three reasons for thinking that nepotism is wrong. Next, I offer a defense of nepotism, arguing that it is often permissible and even admirable. Finally, I identify circumstances in which nepotism is impermissible. My conclusions accord with common wisdom, but not the views of many philosophers.
• Conflicts Of Interest: A Conceptual Analysis
  • Conflicts of interest are ubiquitous in organizational life, and yet our understanding of conflicts is extremely contextual and is frequently imbued with unexamined moral assumptions. This article responds to these problems by presenting a conceptualization of conflicts of interest that builds upon ideas from analytic philosophy in order to address the fundamental question of what a conflict of interest is. Our analysis uses John Searle’s (1995, 2010) social ontology to perform a bottom-up examination of the basic building blocks of social reality. We argue that conflicts of interest inevitably emerge as social facts as soon as societies attribute statuses to people and objects. A formal analysis of information structures within our framework reveals the importance of judgment in the resolution of conflicts of interest. Our account also identifies the ways in which conflicts of interest can undermine institutional structure and, hence, can be problematic for institutional, rather than moral, reasons. We use an institutional categorization of conflicts of interest to provide a complete, high-level account of organizational responses to conflicts of interest that is applicable in every context.
• Exploring The Mental Process Behind Moral Rationalization
  • Abstract: As ever, we live in an environment of disinformation and unfair practice in too many of our encounters with business. Some people enjoy the cruelty and exclusion of others; however, most people like to think they are good, honest people, and seek to justify their actions even when they have done things that harm or disadvantage others. In these cases, moral standards or principles are often applied by business agents, whether employees, managers, executives, or even CEOs, not to help determine the most ethical course of action, but rather to help justify their own previous, current, or anticipated unethical behavior. To address this specific psychological phenomenon taking place within the business world, this paper examines one of the primary challenges of both understanding and engaging in ethical decision making, specifically, the fully conscious or more typically unconscious mental process that leads to moral rationalization. Following an overview of the major moral rationalizations that can be used to facilitate or sanction unethical behavior, examples from the corporate world are provided to help better illustrate and understand the insidious application of a set of moral rationalizations. A conceptual process model is then offered to assist in the organization and analysis of the various moral rationalizations typically used to justify unethical activity. Based on the analysis, the study’s implications and limitations are indicated, as well as suggestions for future research on the moral rationalization psychological process taking place within the business world.

Session 6B: Mission, Ethical Fellowship and Selfishness

• Mission Drift: An Ethical Perspective On Mission In Social Organizations
  • Organizations accused of mission drift often experience challenges related to raising money and engaging stakeholders in their work. However, the study of mission drift appears to be in an early stage. First, research to-date on mission drift has been subject to limited overlap in definitions, theories, and causes. Next, while there are significant moral and ethical undertones in the literature, limited focus has been placed on formally introducing ethical perspectives into this work. Finally, although a general definition for mission drift (a drift from the intended activities of an organization) exists, the ways mission drift has been operationalized are based on unstated assumptions about the appropriate ethical lens through which to assess the effectiveness of social organizations. This systematic literature review seeks to integrate the research to-date regarding the definition of and causes of mission drift, while also incorporating ethical perspectives into the discussion. I propose a new definition of mission drift as a breach of a social contract that exists between the organization and its stakeholders. I also outline future research possibilities that may benefit from incorporating an ethical framework, such as assessing the communities that have an influence on mission drift, operationalizing mission drift, prioritizing influences, and managing implicit social contracts.
• Making Room For Followers: A Grounded Theory Study Of Ethical Followership Among Professional Engineers
  • In the last twenty-five years of organizational research, ethical leadership figures prominently as an answer to the question, “How do workers learn how to do the right thing when facing an ethical dilemma?” However, enthusiasm for a leader-centric view of ethics at work has outpaced the potential to explore the ways that followers navigate ethical dilemmas. To date, the literature has not defined and operationalized “ethical followership” as a construct, and as a result, it remains unclear what behaviors an ethical follower applies in response to an unethical directive or request. The antecedents and outcomes of these ethical follower behaviors also remain unclear. This article provides an introduction to the literature on ethical leadership and ethical followership. It then outlines the methods and results of a grounded theory study on ethical followership among professional engineers, including a definition and theoretical framework for ethical followership. Implications for this theoretical framework are discussed.
• Forced Into Selfishness? Task Deadlines, Experienced Tensions, And Self-Interested Decisions
  • Tight deadlines reduce helping and increase the likelihood of making self-interested decisions. This effect has been attributed to reduced awareness about the consequences of such choices. The present research offers another possibility. Specifically, I argue that tight deadlines constrain employees’ ability to address competing work demands, consequently increasing the awareness and overall experience of tensions, i.e., contradictory demands, goals, and interests. In turn, experienced tensions increase the likelihood of prioritizing self-interest, i.e., individuals’ attempts to prioritize their own interests at the expense of other members of the group, because individuals are aware that it is not feasible to accomplish everything with the given resources. I further identify an important boundary condition, the salience of an alternative solution to addressing the competing demands. Three vignette studies show that tight deadlines are more likely to lead to self-interested decisions, although this effect is contingent on an alternative solution being not salient (Studies 2-3). In addition to providing an alternative explanation for the effect of tight deadlines on self-interested choices, these findings go one step further to exploring feasible ways of mitigating these effects to foster healthy workplaces that facilitate exchange and collaboration without overburdening the individual.

Session 7C: Privacy

• Does The Gender, Race, And Ethnicity Survey By Clarivate Scholar One, Cambridge University Press, And The Society For Business Ethics Violate The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) And If So, Why Does It Matter?
  • In January 2023 Clarivate Scholar One on behalf of Cambridge University Press (CUP) and the Society for Business Ethics (SBE) has started to collect special category personal data of gender identity, race identity and ethnicity of Scholar One users including members of the SBE and individuals from the European Union (EU). This survey is part of an industry wide endeavor to address issues of diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) to provide data for DEI reports, policies, and measures. Yet, the processing of such special category personal data is prohibited by EU law and admitted only by exception under certain conditions. CUP and SBE as the “controllers” and Scholar One as the “processor” likely have violated Art. 9 (1) GDPR and neglected the privacy rights of numerous Scholar One users and SBE members from the EU by deviating from the GDPR principles (Art. 5), by not providing mandatory information (Art. 13), and by missing to name a representative in the EU to whom legal concerns can be addressed (Art. 27). Even more so, the SBE privacy policy says that the SBE does not collect such personal data on race and ethnicity (among other sensitive data). Hence, the SBE likely violates also its own ethical standards. The present paper describes the case, provides a brief legal analysis, and suggests measures for improvement. The analysis is grounded on the participator observation method and is based on the author’s own experiences as a data subject in and subsequent complainant of this survey.
• Worker Engagement Technology And Data Collection: An Argument For Worker-Driven Social Responsibility
  • Companies are using digital technologies to engage and query workers in their supply chains directly about their working conditions. These worker engagement information and communication technologies (“WEtech”) offer a new iteration of digitally assisted supply chain social auditing through the use of text messages, websites, blockchain surveys, and smartphone apps. Little is known empirically about these technologies or their ethical implications. This paper narratively examines the potential ethical challenges of digitally assisted data collection in supply chains through a thought experiment approach. It observes what could happen from shifting from an assumption that data collected in supply chains is physical good and hence private (organizational) property. Furthermore, this paper considers the different implications of data as property vs. data as knowledge for the social good vs. collective endeavor in terms of ethical responsibility through different metaphors. It concludes with the potential for worker-driven social responsibility as an accompaniment to digital data collection endeavors in supply chains.
• Balancing Inclusion And Privacy: Employee Reactions To Pronoun Disclosure Policies
  • How do employees respond when their organization adopts (or declines to adopt) a potentially controversial diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiative, thereby taking (or avoiding) a sociopolitical stance in the workplace? Combining the Unfolding Model of Turnover and cognitive appraisal theory, we provide a nuanced perspective that explains divergent employee reactions in response to the same DEI initiative. Specifically, we unpack individual employee reactions to a specific DEI policy, pronoun disclosure policies, and examine whether firms are better off “playing it safe” by not formalizing such policies. Using an experimental design, we test the effects of adopting a formal (optional or mandatory) pronoun disclosure policy versus a firm choosing not to adopt a formal policy (no formal) on perceived invasion of privacy, moral outrage, and turnover intentions for LGBTQIA+ (Study 1) and non-LGBTQIA+ (Study 2) employees. Even though formal pronoun disclosure policies elicit concerns of invasion of privacy and subsequent moral outrage and turnover intentions, our findings indicate that firms that adopt no formal policy elicit the strongest reactions from employees and the highest levels of moral outrage and intended turnover. Between optional and mandatory pronoun policies, our studies suggest optional policies are preferable because they cause the lowest levels of invasion of privacy, moral outrage, and turnover intentions. We further find that LGBTQIA+ identity salience and LGBTQIA+ allyship attenuate the effects of formal policies on privacy concerns.

Session 7D: Emotions, Moral Courage And Ethical Decision Making

• The Role Of Emotions In Stakeholder Trust And Trust Breaches: A Theoretical Model
  • In this article, we develop a theoretical framework – the Emotion and Stakeholder Trust Framework (ESTF) – to understand the relationship between emotions and stakeholder trust. Emotions are pervasive in stakeholder-organization relationships and profoundly influence stakeholder perceptions and decisions, and we argue that a complete model of the stakeholder trust process must consider the influence of emotions. We propose that stakeholders use their emotions – and the emotional expressions of organizational representatives (e.g., CEO, press secretary) – to inform their trust perceptions and trust in the organization. We consider different sources of stakeholder emotions (including trust breaches), the intrapersonal and interpersonal effects of emotions on stakeholder trust, and the processes that underlie these relationships. In all, our article advances our understanding of stakeholder emotions, stakeholder trust, and the trust process and provides a theoretical foundation for a program of empirical research.
• Moral Courage Of Family And Non-Family Firms In The Fight Against Corruption: A Neo-Configurational Perspective
  • Family business research has increasingly focused on the governance of ethical issues. However, our knowledge on the role of family firms in the fight against the problem of corruption has been largely neglected so far. The aim of this research is hence to shed light on how interconnected factors across multiple levels of analysis link with moral courage in the fight against corruption. We particularly zoom in on configurations of being a family firm or not, organizational efforts, firm size, and corruption risk context. Using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis as our research method and data on a varied set of 52 firms from Germany and Switzerland, we identify four equifinal configurational patterns that link with high moral courage. Our findings suggest that patterns for family firms and non-family firms only marginally overlap, underlining differences between these two organizational forms. Moreover, for family firms we identified multiple equifinal paths linking organizational efforts to high moral courage depending on the corruption risk in a firm’s business sector and firm size. Taken together, our research has important implications for family firm and anti-corruption research and practice.
• A Tri-Process Theory Of Ethical Decision Making: How Cognitive Misers Can Get Stuck-In-The-Algorithmic-Middle
  • The ethical decision-making process model presented here provides a tri-process account of cognition. This approach theorizes that fast, non-conscious affect-laden intuitions drive a great deal of decision-making (referred to as Type 1 processing). However, individuals also utilize conscious, effortful processing to think more deeply when necessary (referred to as Type 2 processing). Within this Type 2 processing, the theory here also adopts Stanovich’s (2009) conceptualization of distinct levels of reasoning termed the algorithmic level and the reflective level. Algorithmic processing requires less cognitive effort and is responsible for analytic thought through serial associative cognition that utilizes working memory resources to examine a discrete focal model. This level of processing also enables individuals to decouple thought and begin to consider simulations of alternatives if warranted. In contrast, the reflective level is the domain of critical reasoning that requires focused and highly effortful cognition. The model also assumes that individuals operate as cognitive misers and conserve their limited cognitive resources wherever possible. More effortful cognitive activity only intervenes if individuals do not experience sufficient feelings that their intuitive (or algorithmic) judgements are both right and appropriate within the defined decision context. The model presents important considerations for ethical decision making. In particular, the paper highlights the risk that individuals will become ‘stuck-in-the-algorithmic-middle’ overriding valuable moral intuitions while simultaneously failing to elevate their thinking to invoke critical thought at the reflective level.

Session 7E: Panel 4

• What Has Metaethics Done For You Lately?