Moral identity has been touted as a foundation for understanding moral agency in organizations. The purpose of this article is to review the current state of knowledge regarding moral identity and highlight several promising avenues for advancing current understandings of moral actions in organizational contexts. The article begins with a brief overview of two distinct conceptual perspectives on moral identity—the character perspective and the social-cognitive perspective—that dominate extant literature. It then discusses varying approaches that have been taken in attempting to measure moral identity. The final two sections of the article review empirical findings regarding the antecedents and consequences of moral identity, respectively. Mechanisms and situational factors that are pertinent to moral agency in organizations are emphasized in both sections.

Globally, family firms are the dominant organizational form. Family involvement in business and unique family dynamics impacts organizational strategy and performance. However, family control of business has rarely been adopted as a discriminating variable in the organizations and the natural environment (ONE) research field. Drawing on the theory of planned behavior we develop a conceptual framework of the drivers of proactive environmental strategy (PES) in family firms. We argue that family involvement in business influences the attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control of a firm’s dominant coalition. Together these factors determine the extent of the dominant coalition’s intentions to undertake PES. Further, family firms with lower levels of relationship conflict within the controlling family will be more successful in translating the dominant coalition’s intentions to allocate resources for the pursuit of PES. Research implications of the theory are discussed.

Organizations constitute morally-complex environments, requiring organization members to possess levels of moral courage sufficient to promote their ethical action, while refraining from unethical actions when faced with temptations or pressures. Using a sample drawn from a military context, we explored the antecedents and consequences of moral courage. Results from this four-month field study demonstrated that authentic leadership was positively related to followers’ displays of moral courage. Further, followers’ moral courage fully mediated the effects of authentic leadership on followers’ ethical and pro-social behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications for further integrating the work on moral courage, authentic leadership and ethics are discussed.

This article assesses the proliferation of international accountability standards (IAS) in the recent past. We provide a comprehensive overview about the different types of standards and discuss their role as part of a new institutional infrastructure for corporate responsibility. Based on this, it is argued that IAS can advance corporate responsibility on a global level because they contribute to the closure of some omnipresent governance gaps. IAS also improve the preparedness of an organization to give an explanation and a justification to relevant stakeholders for its judgments, intentions, acts and omissions when appropriately called upon to do so. However, IAS also face a variety of problems impeding their potential to help address social and environmental issues. The contribution of the four articles in this special section is discussed in the context of standards’ problems and opportunities. The article closes by outlining a research agenda to further develop and extend the scholarly debate around IAS.

Previous research has identified multiple approaches to the design and implementation of corporate ethics programs (Paine, 1994; Weaver, Treviño, and Cochran, in press b; Treviño, Weaver, Gibson, and Toffler, in press). This field survey in a large financial services company investigated the relationships of the values and compliance orientations in an ethics program to a diverse set of outcomes. Employees’ perceptions that the company ethics program is oriented toward affirming ethical values were associated with seven outcomes. Perceptions of a compliance orientation were associated with four of these outcomes. The interaction of values and compliance orientations was associated with employees’ willingness to report misconduct. In general, a values orientation makes a greater unique contribution to the measured outcomes when compared to a compliance orientation.

In this article we first review the development of the concept of global business citizenship and show how the libertarian political philosophy of free-market capitalism must give way to a communitarian view in order for the voluntaristic, local notion of “corporate citizenship” to take root. We then distinguish the concept of global business citizenship from “corporate citizenship” by showing how the former concept requires a transition from communitarian thinking to a position of universal human rights. In addition, we link global business citizenship to global business strategy and to three analytical levels of ethical norms. Finally, we trace a process whereby global businesses can implement fundamental norms and learn to accommodate to legitimate cultural differences.

The three leading normative theories of business ethics are the stockholder theory, the stakeholder theory, and the social contract theory. Currently, the stockholder theory is somewhat out of favor with many members of the business ethics community. The stakeholder theory, in contrast, is widely accepted, and the social contract theory appears to be gaining increasing adherents. In this article, I undertake a critical review of the supporting arguments for each of the theories, and argue that the stockholder theory is neither as outdated nor as flawed as it is sometimes made to seem and that there are significant problems with the grounding of both the stakeholder and social contract theory. I conclude by suggesting that a truly adequate normative theory of business ethics must ultimately be grounded in individual consent.

As we transition to the 21st century, it is useful to think about some of the most important challenges business and other organizations will face as the new millennium begins. What will constitute “business as usual” in the business ethics arena as we start and move into the new century? My overall thought is that we will pulsate into the future on our current trajectory and that the new century will not cause cataclysmic changes, at least not immediately. Rather, the problems and challenges we face now we will face then. Undoubtedly, new issues will arise but they will more likely be extensions of the present than discontinuities with the past.

In this paper I argue that a greater understanding of the part of ethics in leadership will improve leadership studies. Debates over the definition of leadership are really debates over what researchers think constitutes good leadership. The ultimate question is not “What is leadership?” but “What is good leadership?” The word good is refers to both ethics and competence. Research into leadership ethics would explore the ethical issues of current leadership research, serve as a critical study of the field, analyze and expand normative theories of leadership, and develop new theories, research questions and ways of thinking about leadership.

This paper is a further development of two previous pieces of work (Moore 2002, 2005) in which modern virtue ethics, and in particular MacIntyre’s (1985) related notions of “practice” and “institution,” have been explored in the context of business. It first introduces and defines the concept of corporate character and seeks to establish why it is important. It then reviews MacIntyre’s virtues-practice-institution schema and the implications of this at the level of the institution in question—the corporation—and argues that the concept of corporate character follows from, but is a novel development of, MacIntyre’s schema. The paper contrasts corporate character and virtues with the more familiar concepts of corporate culture and values. The constitutive and substantive elements of corporate character, including the essential corporate virtues, are then drawn out and illustrated with reference to the cases explored in Koehn (1998). Finally, the paper acknowledges and counters a specific criticism of this approach.

Organizational justice and injustice are widely noted influences on employees’ ethical behavior. Corporate ethics programs also raise issues of justice; organizations that fail to “follow-through” on their ethics policies may be perceived as violating employees’ expectations of procedural and retributive justice. In this empirical study of four large corporations, we considered employees’ perceptions of general organizational justice, and their perceptions of ethics program follow-through, in relation to unethical behavior that harms the organization, and to employees’ willingness to help the organization by reporting ethical problems and issues to management. Results show that when employees perceive general organizational justice and ethics program follow-through, there is less unethical behavior and greater willingness to report problems. General justice and ethics program follow-through also interact with each other, showing that the impact of ethics initiatives is influenced by the organizational context.

Codes of conduct are viewed here as a community's attempt to communicate its expectations and standards of ethical behavior. Many organizations are implementing codes, but empirical support for the relationship between such codes and employee conduct is lacking. We investigated the long term effects of a collegiate honor code experience as well as the effects of corporate ethics codes on unethical behavior in the workplace by surveying alumni from an honor code and a non-honor code college who now work in business. We found that self-reported unethical behavior was lower for respondents who work in an organization with a corporate code of conduct and was inversely associated with corporate code implementation strength and embeddedness. Self-reported unethical behavior was also influenced by the interaction of a collegiate honor code experience and corporate code implementation strength.

The literature on certifiable management standards has not paid sufficient attention to implementation of standard requirements in certified firms. Firms that obtain standard certification to achieve the legitimacy benefits of certification may not implement standard requirements sufficiently to realize the standard’s intended performance outcomes. We argue that such decoupling of implementation from certification threatens the effectiveness of certifiable standards as governance mechanisms for firms’ environmental conduct because standard certification may not accurately signal firms’ superior environmental performance to external stakeholders. Empirical findings based on the ISO 14001 standard at the facility level support this view: Quality of standard implementation affects facilities’ environmental performance, and environmental performance of certified and non-certified facilities does not differ significantly for the overall sample and low-quality implementers, while high-quality implementers have better environmental performance than their non-certified counterparts. We provide recommendations for increasing the effectiveness of governance systems for firm conduct based on certifiable standards.

Based on theoretical insights of discourse ethics as developed by Jürgen Habermas, we delineate a proposal to further develop the institutionalization of social accounting in multinational corporations (MNCs) by means of “Social Accountability 8000” (SA 8000). First, we discuss the cornerstones of Habermas's discourse ethics and elucidate how and why this concept can provide a theoretical justification of the moral point of view in MNCs. Second, the basic conception, main purpose, and implementation procedure of SA 8000 are presented. Third, we critically examine SA 8000 from a Habermasian perspective, and discuss advantages and drawbacks of the initiative. Fourth, to address the drawbacks, we introduce a “discourse-ethically” extended version of SA 8000. We show that this approach is theoretically well-founded and able to overcome some of the current deficits of the certification initiative. We demonstrate that the extended version of SA 8000 can be successfully applied on a cross-cultural basis, and that our findings have significant implications for other international ethics initiatives.

This paper argues that social reporting can be an important form of New Governance regulation to achieve stakeholder accountability. Current social reporting practices, however, fall short of achieving stakeholder accountability and actually may work against it. By examining the success and failures of other transparency programs in the United States, we can identify key factors for ensuring the success of social reporting over the long term. These factors include increasing the benefits-to-costs ratios of both the users of the information and the disclosers, and recognizing the importance of the involvement of third-party intermediaries.

A growing number of researchers in the business ethics field have used scenarios as a data gathering technique in their empirical investigations of ethical issues. This paper offers a review and critique of 26 studies that have utilized scenarios to elicit inferences of ethical reasoning, decision making, and/or intended behavior from managerial or student populations. The use of a theoretical foundation, the development of hypotheses, various characteristics germane to the use of scenarios, population and sampling issues, and the use of statistical measures are explored and assessed. In the interest of improving scenario-based research, ten recommendations are presented to guide future scenario research.

We analyzed data from a survey of employees of a large military base in order to assess possible differences in the whistle-blowing process due to type of wrongdoing observed. Employees who observed perceived wrongdoing involving mismanagement, sexual harassment, or unspecified legal violations were significantly more likely to report it than were employees who observed stealing, waste, safety problems, or discrimination. Further, type of wrongdoing was significantly related to reasons given by employees who observed wrongdoing but did not report it, across all forms of wrongdoing. However, the primary reason that observers did not report it was that they thought nothing could be done to rectify the situation. Finally, type of wrongdoing was significantly related to the cost of the wrongdoing, the quality of the evidence about the wrongdoing, and the comprehensiveness of retaliation against the whistle-blower. These findings suggest that type of wrongdoing makes a difference in the whistle-blowing process, and it should be examined in future research.

Although the literature on multi-stakeholder initiatives for sustainability has grown in recent years, it is scattered across several academic fields, making it hard to ascertain how individual disciplines, such as business ethics, can further contribute to the debate. Based on an extensive review of the literature on certification and principle-based MSIs for sustainability (n = 293 articles), we show that the scholarly debate rests on three broad themes (the “3Is”): the input into creating and governing MSIs; the institutionalization of MSIs; and the impact that relevant initiatives create. While our discussion reveals the theoretical underpinnings of the 3Is, it also shows that a number of research challenges related to business ethics remain unaddressed. We unpack these challenges and suggest how scholars can utilize theoretical insights in business ethics to push the boundaries of the field. Finally, we also discuss what business ethics research can gain from theory development in the MSI field.

Human rights have not played an overwhelmingly prominent role in CSR in the past. Similarly, CSR has had relatively little influence on what is now called the “business and human rights debate.” This contribution uncovers some of the reasons for the rather peculiar disconnect between these two debates and, based on it, presents some apparent synergies and complementarities between the two. A closer integration of the two debates, as it argues, would allow for the formulation of an expansive and demanding conception of corporate human rights obligations. Such a conception does not stop with corporate obligations “merely” to respect human rights, but includes an extended focus on proactive company involvement in the protection and realization of human rights. In other words, the integration of the two debates provides the space within which to formulate positive human rights obligations for corporations.

Transnational corporations have become actors with significant political power and authority which should entail responsibility and liability, specifically direct liability for complicity in human rights violations. Holding TNCs liable for human rights violations is complicated by the discontinuity between the fragmented legal/political structure of the TNC and its integrated strategic reality and the international state system which privileges sovereignty and non-intervention over the protection of individual rights. However, the post-Westphalian transition—the emergence of multiple authorities, increasing ambiguity of borders and jurisdiction and blurring of the line between the public and private spheres—should facilitate imposing direct responsibility on transnational firms. Mechanisms for imposing direct responsibility on TNCs are considered including voluntary agreements and international law. However, I conclude that a hybrid public-private regime which relies on non-hierarchical compliance mechanisms is likely to be both more effective and consistent with the structure of the emerging transnational order.