Moral courage in the workplace: moving to and from the desire and decision to act

Abstract

Why is moral courage in the workplace viewed as the unusual, rather than the norm? If we want to cultivate organizational environments that exhibit moral strength, we must consider how courage can be exercised in daily organizational life, as an action that can be achieved by everyone. To explore this notion, we see a need to develop additional understanding of how people determine whether or not they will act in a morally courageous way when faced with an ethical challenge. While existing theory sheds light on various aspects of ethical decision making, missing from the literature is an examination of how emotions, automatic responses to situational conditions, along with conscious and deliberative thought, work together to help guide this process. Yet to be fully explored are the internal factors and the social influences that accompany them, specifically those that contribute to forming the desire and decision to act with moral courage. We argue that scholarship designed to explain how this process unfolds will reshape our understanding of moral courage as an action open to self-control, and thus can occur more frequently than the rare event it is often presumed to be. Our depiction of the organizational member’s response to an ethical challenge helps take moral courage out of the extraordinary and into the realm of what can be achieved by most people, at least some of the time. Leading scholars in the area of ethical decision making have put forth an invitation to integrate constructs, topics and issues that span academic fields, taking a cross-disciplinary approach (Payne & Giacalone 1990, Treviño 1992). We accept this call and propose a process orientation to the study of moral conduct, one that is grounded in the behavioural sciences but mindful of philosophical contributions. Considering the recent focus on positive organizational scholarship (Cameron et al. 2003), we also show how moral courage can be better understood, encouraged and taught, by learning what contributes to organizational moral flourishing. If organizational members are expected to conduct themselves with exemplary standards of ethical behaviour, it is the responsibility of scholars and managers to provide clarity on how to do so effectively. To address this concern we ask, What induces people to act in morally courageous ways as they face an ethical challenge in the workplace? Our starting assumption is that moral courage can be realized and achieved by most organizational members, under certain personal and situational conditions. To build Respectively: Assistant Professor, Organizational Behavior and Ethics, Graduate School of Business & Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, USA; and Professor of Marketing, Stephen M. Ross School of Business & Professor of Social and Administrative Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, MI, USA.