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Morals
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- July–August 2023
- Article
Case Study: How Should a Start-Up Cut Its Burn Rate?
By: Nitin Nohria, Katie Josephson, Sophia Wronsky and Elizabeth Rha
Tyler Smith, the founder and CEO of the enterprise software firm Puck.io, is facing a hard decision. Just three months earlier the company laid off 20% of its employees to reduce its burn rate amid growing economic uncertainty and a suddenly unattractive funding... View Details
- June 14, 2023
- Article
Research: Your Love for Work May Alienate Your Colleagues
By: Mijeong Kwon, Julia Lee Cunningham and Jon M. Jachimowicz
Research shows that employees who are passionate about their work are more productive, innovative, and collaborative. New research suggests that these employees also see passion for work as a moral imperative, and they’re more likely to judge colleagues who are... View Details
- June 2023
- Article
Amplification of Emotion on Social Media
By: Amit Goldenberg and Robb Willer
Why do expressions of emotion seem so heightened on social media? Brady et al. argue that extreme moral outrage on social media is not only driven by the producers and sharers of emotional expressions, but also by systematic biases in the way people that perceive moral... View Details
- June 2023
- Article
Can Purpose Foster Stakeholder Trust in Corporations
By: Ranjay Gulati and Franz Wohlgezogen
As part of institutional changes toward more responsible capitalism, firms increasingly articulate a purpose beyond simply profit as a central tenet of their governance. Management scholarship has noted the potential advantages of such purpose-focus for stakeholder... View Details
- 2023
- Working Paper
The Politics of Philanthropy in China
By: Geoffrey Jones and Yuhai Wu
This working paper looks historically at business philanthropy in China. In the West, the literature has distinguished between entrepreneurial and customary philanthropy, while the phenomenon of spiritual philanthropy has been identified in many emerging markets. This... View Details
- March 2023
- Article
Developing Moral Muscle in a Literature-based Business Ethics Course
By: Inge M. Brokerhof, Sandra J. Sucher, P. Matthijs Bal, Frank Hakemulder, Paul G. W. Jansen and Omar N. Solinger
Moral subjectivity (e.g., reflexivity, perspective-taking) is a necessary condition for moral
development. However, widely used approaches to business ethics education, rooted in
conceptualizations of ethical development as objective and quantifiable, often neglect... View Details
- March 1, 2023
- Editorial
To Overcome Resistance to DEI, Understand What’s Driving It
By: Eric Shuman, Eric Knowles and Amit Goldenberg
Employees often resist DEI initiatives, which of course hinders their effectiveness. The authors—experts in the resistance to social-change efforts—write that the key to overcoming resistance to any effort is figuring out why people are resisting. When it comes to DEI... View Details
- January 2023
- Case
Natura: Weathering the Pandemic at Brazil's Cosmetic Giant
By: Brian Trelstad, Pedro Levindo and Carla Larangeira
Brazil's Natura, a multi-brand cosmetics group, has taken several measures to safeguard the livelihoods of its thousands of employees and millions of sales representatives during the COVID-19 health and economic crisis. The company has also made strides in its efforts... View Details
Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic; ESG Reporting; Acquisition; Customer Focus and Relationships; Decision Making; Social Entrepreneurship; Environmental Sustainability; Environmental Management; Climate Change; Ethics; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Global Strategy; Corporate Governance; Health Pandemics; Human Resources; Human Capital; Crisis Management; Growth and Development Strategy; Marketing; Distribution Channels; Supply Chain; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Mission and Purpose; Organizational Culture; Customer Ownership; Relationships; Business and Community Relations; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Networks; Partners and Partnerships; Science-Based Business; Reputation; Human Needs; Social Issues; Strategy; Equality and Inequality; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Brazil; Latin America
- 2023
- Working Paper
'It Wouldn’t Have Mattered Anyway': When Overdetermined Outcomes Justify Our Sins
By: Stephanie C. Lin, Julian J. Zlatev and Dale T. Miller
We identify and document an “overdetermined outcome defense” which occurs when one learns
that circumstances besides one’s own actions were sufficient to produce a negative effect (e.g.,
deciding not to go to the gym, but later discovering that the gym had been... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Consumers Hold Autonomous Vehicles Liable Even When Not at Fault
By: Julian De Freitas, Xilin Zhou, Margherita Atzei, Shoshana Boardman and Luigi Di Lillo
The deployment of autonomous vehicles (AVs) and the accompanying societal and economic benefits will greatly depend on how much liability AV firms will have to carry for accidents involving these vehicles, which in turn impacts their insurability and associated... View Details
- Winter 2023
- Article
Moral Firms?
Building a new political economy requires transforming our markets, our institutions, and our policy and regulatory regimes. In this essay, I argue that it also requires transforming the purpose of the firm: from a singular focus on maximizing financial returns to the... View Details
- December 2022 (Revised February 2023)
- Case
Daniel Defense: Responding to the Shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX
By: Benjamin C. Esty and Daniel Fisher
At 11:33am on May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old man from Uvalde, Texas walked into the Robb Elementary School carrying a semi-automatic "AR-15-style” rifle manufactured by Daniel Defense and killed 19 children and two adults. Three days later, Representative Carolyn Maloney... View Details
Keywords: Gun Violence; Gun Policy; Second Amendment; Legal Liability; Government Legislation; Marketing Strategy; Business or Company Management; Product Marketing; Ethics; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Moral Sensibility; Crime and Corruption; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Manufacturing Industry; Advertising Industry; United States
- 2022
- Article
The Ordinary Concept of a Meaningful Life: The Role of Subjective and Objective Factors in Third-Person Attributions of Meaning
By: Michael Prinzing, Julian De Freitas and Barbara L. Fredrickson
The desire for a meaningful life is ubiquitous, yet the ordinary concept of a meaningful life is poorly understood. Across six experiments (total N = 2,539), we investigated whether third-person attributions of meaning depend on the psychological states an agent... View Details
- October 2022
- Article
When Does Moral Engagement Risk Triggering a Hypocrite Penalty?
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Roseanna Sommers
Society suffers when people stay silent on moral issues. Yet people who engage morally may appear hypocritical if they behave imperfectly themselves. Research reveals that hypocrites can—but do not always—trigger a “hypocrisy penalty,” whereby they are evaluated... View Details
- September–October 2022
- Article
Seeking Purity, Avoiding Pollution: Strategies for Moral Career Building
By: Erin Reid and Lakshmi Ramarajan
This study builds theory on how people construct moral careers. Analyzing interviews with 102 journalists, we show how people build moral careers by seeking jobs that allow them to fulfill both the institution’s moral obligations and their own material aims. We... View Details
- 2022
- Chapter
Redirecting Rawlsian Reasoning Toward the Greater Good
By: Joshua D. Greene, Karen Huang and Max Bazerman
In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls employed the ‘veil of Ignorance’ as a moral reasoning device designed to promote impartial thinking. By imagining the choices of decision-makers who are blind to biasing information, one might see more clearly the organizing... View Details
- July 2022
- Article
When Alterations Are Violations: Moral Outrage and Punishment in Response to (Even Minor) Alterations to Rituals
By: Daniel H. Stein, Juliana Schroeder, Nicholas M. Hobson, Francesca Gino and Michael I. Norton
From Catholics performing the sign of the cross since the 4th century to Americans reciting the Pledge of Allegiance since the 1890s, group rituals (i.e., predefined sequences of symbolic actions) have strikingly consistent features over time. Seven studies (N = 4,213)... View Details
Keywords: Ritual; Morality; Groups; Norms; Commitment; Groups and Teams; Values and Beliefs; Change; Moral Sensibility; Behavior
- April 2022 (Revised August 2022)
- Case
Conflicts of Interest at Uptown Bank
By: Jonas Heese
In 2013, two employees debated whether to blow the whistle on their employer, Bell Bank, after completing an internal review that revealed undisclosed conflicts of interest. Bell Bank’s Asset Management business disproportionately invested clients’ money in Bell Bank’s... View Details
Keywords: Whistleblower; Whistleblowing; Mutual Funds; Conflicts Of Interest; Decision Making; Decisions; Judgments; Ethics; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Finance; Financial Institutions; Banks and Banking; Financial Management; Investment; Investment Funds; Governance; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Disclosure; Corporate Governance; Governance Compliance; Governance Controls; Policy; Law; Legal Liability; Social Psychology; Motivation and Incentives; Perception; Perspective; Trust; Financial Services Industry; North and Central America; United States
- Article
Creating High-Impact Coalitions: CEOs Can Lead the Charge on Society’s Biggest Problems
By: Rosabeth M. Kanter and Tuna Cem Hayirli
Traditionally, responses to crises and societal problems—the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, racial inequities—are considered the responsibility of the public sector and NGOs. But addressing the world’s most critical problems requires leadership, resources, and... View Details
- 2022
- Chapter
Firms, Morality, and the Search for a Better World
Book Abstract: Defining a just economy in a tenuous social-political time. If we can agree that our current social-political moment is tenuous and unsustainable—and indeed, that may be the only thing we can agree on right now—then how do markets, governments, and... View Details