The March 31, 2015 Lab seminar was presented by Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics Lab Fellow Dr Andromachi Athanasopoulou, who is also Associate Fellow - Executive Education (Organizational Behavior) at the Said Business School of the University of Oxford. Her Lab presentation titled, “Coping with Moral Dilemmas at Work: Managers, Business School Academics and the Development of Ethical Leaders” centered on the research she has been conducting during her fellowship year at the Center, which combines her interests in corporate social responsibility and leadership development to study potential differences between academics’ and managers’ approach to moral dilemmas at work. This project contributes to a broader discussion in the field of management regarding how management education can more effectively nurture ethical leadership.
Athanasopoulou opened the Lab seminar by discussing some of the motivations behind her research. She explained that she is primarily interested in how organizational actors make sense and react to situations where moral dilemmas arise, and also if business academics and business managers cope with such dilemmas in different ways. The significance behind these questions, Athanasopoulou believes, is that they might help in investigating how unethical behaviors act as institutional levers, and more specifically, that they may help to reveal if there is (or not) institutional corruption in the way that business schools operate and the types of business managers that they produce. There are materialistic and individualistic values underpinning much of mainstream management, so it’s natural to ask if management education is to blame, or if the unethical behavior simply arises in a hyper competitive environment where personal objectives can corrupt individuals. Athanasopoulou referred to research in the field of management and behavioural ethics that looks into different types of behavior (unethical or other) that may cause adverse effects to one’s environment. Behavioural ethics research, including work by Max Bazerman and Francesca Gino, distinguishes unethical behavior into intentional and unintentional. Also, at times, one encounters what Joshua Margolis and Andrew Molinsky describe as “necessary evils” where individuals may do “harm” to others in an effort to advance important personal, organizational or societal objectives . . At this point, one participant of the Lab asked Athanasopoulou how she defines ethical behavior in the context of business management. She defined this in broad terms as acting responsibly while maintaining respect for an organisation’s stakeholders, shareholders and society at large. One of the participants of the Lab added that for a good businessperson, your goal should be to make the world a better place, even if you’re getting compensated for it. There should be an appropriate balance between self-interest and societal goods. Continuing with the presentation, Athanasopoulou referred to the concept of “blind spots” in ethical decision-making studied by Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel. This means that people may act unethically without meaning to. Such blind spots occur under specific circumstances where ethical dimensions fade away, and people thus disengage from moral decision-making. And it is these moments that Athanasopoulou hopes to learn more about through the course of her research.
Next, Athanasopoulou addressed the concept of moral behavior and the different stages of development in moral reasoning. She referred to research that indicates how these are context-specific. Linking this to management education and drawing from the work of Gianpiero Petriglieri, she referred to the concept of business schools as “identity workspaces” where individual and collective identities are redesigned.
During the main part of her seminar, Athanasopoulou discussed the research design of her study and presented the preliminary findings from her project and ongoing data collection. The research is based on qualitative interviews with managers and business school academics. Each interview is structured around three components: First, a series of open-ended questions on participants’ definition and experience of moral dilemmas. Secondly, a series of vignettes, or fictional moral dilemma scenarios from business contexts and from academia to which participants were asked to respond how they would react if they encountered them in real life, what their thinking process is and what would possibly affect their decisions. The third and last part of each interview was designed to draw on the method of photo elicitation. Prior to the interview each participant had been asked to select a series of images that best represent their feelings when they face a moral dilemma. Photo elicitation is a research method, which is said to elicit deeper emotions and is used in social sciences and humanities.
With this being a new project, the qualitative data collection was ongoing at the time of the March 31st seminar, hence Athanasopoulou presented preliminary findings. The research has now moved on to its next phase, which consist of a series of online surveys and experiments. Therefore, here we provide an anonymised summary of some of the qualitative findings presented at the seminar:
Several distinct differences were observed in the way academics and managers perceive and respond to moral dilemmas. Each group tends to define moral dilemmas differently. One group defines them as the product of conflicting values, interests and imperatives, and the other adopts a stewardship definition, focusing more on whose interests one should serve when deciding. Also, when an “unethical” option was chosen, participants from the one group tended to provide justifications that appeared removed from self-interest and were presented as decisions made for the greater good. Instead participants from the other group were more likely to admit self-interest when choosing to potentially behave unethically. Overall, academics appear somewhat more likely to report moral dilemmas at work. Comparing the responses within each group, there was an observed larger variation within academics’ responses, than within managers’, with regards to how they would react to a moral dilemma. These variations were largely attributed to an academic’s field of specialization. For instance, academics from certain academic fields were more likely than others to dismiss any “ethical” attributes to the presented dilemmas. Overall, in both groups (managers and academics) moral dilemmas outside one’s expertise or comfort zone are seen as more difficult.
- Summary composed by Joseph Hollow