The Many Facets of Workplace Moral Courage: Development and Validation of a Multidimensional Scale

In the battle against unethical behavior in organizations, fostering employees' moral courage proves vital beyond conventional regulation and compliance efforts. To propel this frontier and empower individuals to uphold moral values, a robust measure of workplace moral courage becomes imperative. Drawing upon a competency-based approach, this paper introduces the Workplace Moral Courage Scale (WMCS). Unlike previous measures, the WMCS stands out by acknowledging the diverse ways in which moral courage can manifest within workplace settings. Building on data of two diverse German employee samples (total N = 995), we unveil five distinct factors: challenging colleague and supervisor misconduct, opposing unethical orders, confessing mistakes, and initiating positive changes. The WMCS exhibits good psychometric properties and convergent and discriminant validity. Confirming its concurrent validity, the WMCS effectively predicts various forms of employee silence, even after controlling for organizational influences. The paper concludes with a discussion of the results and implications of the WMCS

A Cybernetic Perspective on Escalation: Lessons from the Volkswagen Emissions Scandal

This paper examines how and why initially well-intentioned organizations can find themselves ethically adrift. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of the Volkswagen emissions scandal, we investigate what planted the seed of deception, why the company’s deceptive behavior changed from one stage to the next, and which factors catalyzed these shifts. Furthermore, we scrutinize the management’s response to the disclosure of their misconduct. We employ a cybernetic perspective, envisioning the dynamics of deception as a multi-stage, goal-directed process, in which shifts in behavior are driven by a need to resolve discrepancies between past and anticipated future states. Our analysis reveals two dominant dysfunctional feedback loops underlying the company’s ethical descent. We conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of this case study and derive propositions about the emergence of such dysfunctional feedback loops, as well as strategies that may help to de-escalate such situations by strengthening ethical feedback loops

Moral commitment: Does it reduce or enhance the response to social norms? Evidence from an experiment on earnings management

Social norms play a powerful role in guiding managerial behavior. For example, prior work has established the power of injunctive (prescriptive) norms in areas where views on what is right and wrong widely differ, such as earnings management (EM). Existing work highlights the effects of social norms on the average norm addressee. However, little is known about individual differences in reactions to injunctive norms. That is, who is more malleable, and who resists more? In this research, we conduct an experiment on EM to study such potential differences in individual responses to social norms. We find that participants with a strong commitment to honesty react less to both EM-disapproving and EM-approving injunctive norms. These findings have implications for the theoretical and empirical analysis of managerial behavior and for the use of injunctive social norms as steering tools for truthful reporting

The Corporate Ethical Culture Scale (CECS): A New Measure of Ethical Culture

How to define and measure ethical culture, how many and which dimensions constitute ethical culture are still unresolved questions in research. The goal of this present paper is to present first steps of the development of a new measurement of ethical culture – the Corporate Ethical Culture Scale (CECS). To address this, we build upon previous instruments, but do also integrate the widely accepted, but so far empirically neglected, distinction of organizational culture; the distinction between compliance-oriented components (emphasizing a culture of control) vs. integrity-oriented components (emphasizing a culture of self-governance and responsibility). Three studies with heterogeneous samples of Swiss and German employees and managers were conducted to create and validate the multidimensional scale. Results of the studies do also suggest that the CECS is capable of predicting unethical working behavior beyond other factors (such as variants of formal ethical regulation). Furthermore, comparisons with other scales do suggest that both compliance- and integrity-based factors are related to duty orientation, but the latter components are more than the former positively associated with perceived autonomous work motivation (in contrast to controlled work motivation)

Das Unsichtbare sichtbar machen

Präferenzen für Umweltgüter hängen immer vom Kontext ab, in dem der einzelne seine Entscheidung trifft. Da viele Umweltbelastungen nicht unmittelbar erfahrbar sind, müssen ökologische Handlungsalternativen in der konkreten Situation erst einmal "in den Sinn" kommen. Wahrnehmungshilfen wie Meßwerte, Okobilanzen oder Umweltlabels können dabei ökologische Präferenzen wachrufen

Multiple linear regression model for the assessment of bond strength in corroded and non-corroded steel bars in structural concrete

With the growth and ageing of the stock of existing structures, structural assessment and retrofitting are fast acquiring a significant role in the construction industry. The benefits of upgrading existing reinforced concrete (RC) structures or extending their service life and of ensuring greater durability in designs for de novo construction have led to a need to include deterioration as a factor in structural safety models. Bond between reinforcing steel and concrete is of cardinal importance in this respect. The present paper proposes a unified formulation for assessing bond strength in corroded and non-corroded steel bars, and an associated model to accommodate the effect of transverse pressure where appropriate. The formulation is the result of applying multiple linear regression analysis to a database built from the findings of over 650 bond tests on corroded and non-corroded reinforcing steel reported in the literature. The data collected include a wide range of variables affecting bond strength, such as bar diameter, concrete compressive strength, concrete cover, anchorage length, confinement ratio and cross-sectional loss. A number of statistical criteria are used to compare the proposed formulation to the other bond strength assessment models, including the fib Model Code 2010 proposal for corroded steel bars. Further to the statistical tests conducted, the model proposed can be usefully applied to assess the structural safety of corroded RC members

Moral Sensitivity Training - A Systematic Review

Moral sensitivity is one of the most important educational goals in the ethical domain. This paper offers a first review of attempts to train moral sensitivity from 1979 to 2018, including 45 studies. The studies were reviewed using a combination of qualitative and quantitative analyses. Our results show that longer courses are generally more successful in fostering moral sensitivity. However, this effect is relatively small. What ultimately appears to have mattered most, was whether learners received personal feedback on their awareness to ethical issues. Training methods that appeared to be of little value in promoting moral sensitivity including problem-based learning, the discussion of papers and texts (seminars) and a strong focus on critical thinking and challenging existing perspectives. A further major implication of our results is that reviews of ethics training ought to differentiate between learning outcomes (e.g., moral sensitivity vs. reasoning)

Contextual Conditions of Ecological Consumerism: A Food-Purchasing Survey

This study seeks to develop an ecological consumption measure based on the Rasch model. At the same time, it also intends to detect contextual conditions that constrain specific food purchases recognized as environmentally significant behaviors. Moreover, it provides information about the environmental impact and consequences of the behaviors that constitute the proposed measure. Questionnaire data from 547 Swiss residents are used to test three classes of contextual conditions: consumer’s socioeconomic characteristics, consumer’s living circumstances, and store characteristics. With differential performance probabilities as the source of information to detect effective contextual influences on ecological behavior, the findings suggest that ecological consumption is rather susceptible to store and household characteristics but not to socioeconomic features. Furthermore, the conditions under consideration are not uniformly supporting or inhibiting. Instead, they appear to inhibit some behaviors while facilitating others