In the USA, civic involvement in adolescence includes political and nonpolitical activities. Given that identities can motivate behavior, how do political and moral identities relate to civic activity choices? In this study, high school students (N = 1578) were surveyed about their political and nonpolitical civic actions and their moral and political identities. Overall, students were more involved in service than they were in political activities. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to investigate the relation between identity and involvement, controlling for (...) known correlates of involvement: sex, ethnicity, parent education, peer civic engagement, parent civic engagement and school civic opportunities. Moral and political identity were positively related to overall involvement. Political identity was positively related to political involvement, but was not related to nonpolitical service. Moral identity was positively related to service and expressive-political involvement, but negatively related to traditional-political involvement. Findings are discussed in light of civic and moral education initiatives. (shrink)

The objective of the present research was two-fold: to provide a new definition of ethical competence, and to clarify the influence of empathy, personal values, and the five-factor model of personality on ethical competence. The present research provides a comprehensive overview about recent approaches and empirically explores the interconnections of these constructs. 366 German undergraduate students were examined in a cross-sectional study that investigated the relationship of empathy, personal values, and the five-factor model of personality with moral judgment competence and (...) counterproductive work behavior as indicators of moral judgment and behavior. We found self-transcendence values to be related to both, high levels of empathy and ethical competence, in contrast to self-enhancement values. Multiple mediation analysis revealed unique effects of empathy on ethical competence through values as mediators. Affective empathy transmitted its effect on ethical competence through benevolence, conformity, tradition, power, and hedonism. Most importantly, perspective taking lost its predictive power when investigated alongside affective empathy dimensions. These results converge to an important role of affective empathy, in particular empathic concern, with regard to personal values and ethical competence. Furthermore, the five-factor model of personality explained variance in measures of ethical competence. Our research suggests that organizational decision makers should consider the role of empathy, personal values, and the five-factor model in their human resource management in order to select employees with high ethical competence. (shrink)

Based on our experience in teaching ethics, we have developed, tested, and presented in this article a program of instruction that rests on four pillars: popular feature films, a six-stage ethical decision-making process, the principles necessary to address ethical situations, and the classroom instructor. Taken separately, there is nothing new or unique in these pillars. Taken together, however, and to our knowledge, these four pillars, including the requirement that each student is expected to prepare a written abstract of the film (...) prior to the classroom discussion of that film in which the student is expected to demonstrate a practical application of ethical principles to actual and concrete moral situations, constitute a new, unique, and tested way to teach ethics to undergraduate students of management and economics. (shrink)

This paper adds ammunition to recent arguments for the possibility of online character friendships in the Aristotelian sense. It does so by exploring sustained and deep email correspondence or epalship as a potential venue for the creation, development and maintenance of character friendships, and by drawing an analogy with a historically famous example of penpalship: that forged between Voltaire and Catherine the Great. It is argued that epalships allow for various technological extensions in the cyberworld of today that were not (...) available to Voltaire and Catherine; and that augmented with those extensions, there is even more reason for seeing epalships as potentially making the grade as true character friendships than traditional penpalships. However, despite being potentially categorisable as character friendships, mature epalships are vulnerable to the same problems and pitfalls as other examples of character friendships, and perhaps even more so: pitfalls that were mostly overlooked by Aristotle himself. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to examine the notion of salesperson moral identity as a prosocial individual trait and its associated effects on customer and coworker relationships. In addition, this study examines the underlying processes in which these effects occur as well as the moderating role of internal competitive climate. Our empirical investigation of business-to-business (B2B) sales professionals reveals that moral identity has both direct and indirect effects on a salesperson’s customer- and team-directed outcomes. Specifically, our results demonstrate that (...) salesperson moral identity positively affects both salesperson-customer identification and organizational identification, which, in turn, impact customer service provision and teamwork. Our findings also indicate that internal competitive climate exacerbates the positive effects of salesperson moral identity on customer service provision and teamwork. (shrink)

This qualitative study explores how business leaders narrate their personal ways of recognizing, reasoning, and resolving moral conflicts and what these stories reveal about their moral identity processes within organizational contexts. Based on interviews with 25 business leaders, 4 moral identity statuses were identified: achievement, moratorium, foreclosure, and diffusion. The moral identity statuses were based on how leaders approached and interpreted moral conflicts and what the influence of the organizational context was in their moral decision-making processes. Some remained steadfast in (...) adhering to their previous value commitments, while others tried to avoid taking any clear moral standpoint. Still others experienced moral conflicts as disequilibrating events that triggered reflective processes and developmental cycles of moral identity change. These moral identity statuses hold implications for facilitating moral identity development among business leaders in the context of work. (shrink)

As a social issue of widespread concern, work-to-family conflict has been found to adversely affect employees’ work and family lives. The current research linked employees’ work-to-family conflict to disruptions in parenting and in turn to adolescents’ materialism. In Study 1, two-wave data from 207 Chinese dual-career families that included an adolescent in junior high school showed that both men’s and women’s work-to-family conflict was positively correlated with material rewards parenting, and this positive relationship was stronger when parenting daughters than sons. (...) Study 2 replicated the results of Study 1 in a sample of 284 Chinese dual-career families that included an adolescent of the same age group. Furthermore, Study 2 showed that employees’ work-to-family conflict was indirectly related to their adolescent offspring’s materialism through increased material rewards parenting, and this mediating effect was stronger for daughters. The results are discussed in terms of the spillover and crossover processes that affect employees and their families in the context of work-to-family conflict. (shrink)

As a social issue of widespread concern, work-to-family conflict has been found to adversely affect employees’ work and family lives. The current research linked employees’ work-to-family conflict to disruptions in parenting and in turn to adolescents’ materialism. In Study 1, two-wave data from 207 Chinese dual-career families that included an adolescent in junior high school showed that both men’s and women’s work-to-family conflict was positively correlated with material rewards parenting, and this positive relationship was stronger when parenting daughters than sons. (...) Study 2 replicated the results of Study 1 in a sample of 284 Chinese dual-career families that included an adolescent of the same age group. Furthermore, Study 2 showed that employees’ work-to-family conflict was indirectly related to their adolescent offspring’s materialism through increased material rewards parenting, and this mediating effect was stronger for daughters. The results are discussed in terms of the spillover and crossover processes that affect employees and their families in the context of work-to-family conflict. (shrink)

The field of behavioral ethics has seen considerable growth over the last few decades. One of the most significant concerns facing this interdisciplinary field of research is the moral judgment-action gap. The moral judgment-action gap is the inconsistency people display when they know what is right but do what they know is wrong. Much of the research in the field of behavioral ethics is based on early work in moral psychology and American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s foundational cognitive model of moral (...) development. However, Kohlberg’s model of moral development lacks a compelling explanation for the judgment-action gap. Yet, it continues to influence theory, research, teaching, and practice in business ethics today. As such, this paper presents a critical review and analysis of the pertinent literature. This paper also reviews modern theories of ethical decision making in business ethics. Gaps in our current understanding and directions for future research in behavioral business ethics are presented. By providing this important theoretical background information, targeted critical analysis, and directions for future research, this paper assists management scholars as they begin to seek a more unified approach, develop newer models of ethical decision making, and conduct business ethics research that examines the moral judgment-action gap. (shrink)

Organizational identification has increasingly attracted scholarly attention as a key factor in understanding organizational processes and in fostering efficient human resource management. Available evidence shows that organizational ethical climate crucially predicts OI, a key determinant of both employees’ attitudes and behaviors. In the present paper, we examined the relationship between two specific ethical climates, distributed leadership, and employees’ attitudes and behaviors, incorporating OI as a core underlying mechanism driving these relationships. Three hundred and forty-two employees filled out questionnaires to examine (...) ethical climate, DL, OI, and a series of measures concerning attitudes and behaviors toward the organization. Structural equation modeling confirmed that a perception of an ethical climate of friendship fostered OI, which elicited higher commitment, perceived trust and recommendation, and lower turnover intention. Perception of DL further contributed to increasing OI. Our findings suggest that HR practices should carefully consider employee perceptions of a collectivistic ethical climate, together with perceptions of DL, as key determinants of positive organizational outcomes. We discuss results in light of the social identity approach and present practical implications for HR management. (shrink)

The acquisition of virtue can be conceptualized as a self-regulatory process in which deliberate practice results in increasingly higher levels of skillfulness in leading a virtuous life. This conceptualization resonates with philosophical virtue theories as much as it converges with psychological models about skill development, expertise, goal motivation, and self-regulation. Yet, the conceptualization of virtue as skill acquisition poses the crucial question of motivation: What motivates individuals to self-improvement over time so that they can learn from past experience, correct mistakes, (...) and expand their ethical knowledge to new and unfamiliar circumstances? In this paper, it is argued that the motivation to increase one’s level of skillfulness in leading a virtuous life is supported by a specific identity goal, namely the goal to be a moral person. However, this moral identity goal needs to carry specific goal characteristics in order to effectively provide this motivation. It needs to be sufficiently abstract, internally motivated and promotion- rather than prevention-oriented. Research in developmental psychology suggests that the moral identity of children is rather concrete, externally motivated, and prevention-oriented. With development, higher levels of abstraction, internal motivation, and promotion-orientation gain importance providing an important motivational basis for a self-regulated process of virtue acquisition. (shrink)

Behavioral intervention techniques leveraging reactive responses have gained popularity as tools for promoting ethical behavior. Choice architects, for example, design and present default opt-out options to nudge individuals into accepting preselected choices deemed beneficial to both the decision-maker and society. Such interventions can also employ mild financial incentives or affective triggers including joy, fear, empathy, social pressure, and reputational rewards. We argue, however, that ethical competence is achieved via reflection, and that heavy reliance on reactive behavioral interventions can undermine the (...) development of ethical competence over the long term. Specifically, drawbacks may occur through motivational displacement, dependency, moral crowding out, loss of personal autonomy, and reactance. We introduce complementary cognitive boosting techniques designed to stimulate reflective cognition, as a more promising long-term strategy for instilling ethical behavior. One such approach is the Moral Self-Awareness (MSA) motivational construct, which incrementally leads agents to increasing levels of ethical reflection. We explain why ethical boosting approaches present more edifying and durable alternatives to reactive behavioral interventions and offer suggestions for social and organizational policy. (shrink)