Laying the groundwork for corporate social responsibility: Behavioral ethics in high-hazard organizations

Abstract

Using findings from an inductive study of two high-hazard organizations and insights from behavioral ethics literature, we build a model illustrating the behavioral foundations of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). We show that employees in high-hazard organizations scrutinize their work, actively deciding how to alter work tasks and boundaries and persevering through obstacles to lay the groundwork for CSR. Central to this process is employee moral awareness—the awareness of one's activities and the consequences those activities may have on others—through which they translate organizational hazards into their work decisions. Our findings further suggest that moral awareness is more dynamic than previously conceptualized, continually assembled, and reassembled through the active exchange and deployment of scientific and moral principles. In contrast to the extant literature that prioritizes the unitary nature of CSR and its top-down effects, our findings uncover individual-level ethical decisions as its foundation and identify moral awareness and work scrutinization as mechanisms through which individuals lay the groundwork for CSR.