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Team Over-Empowerment in Market Research: A Virtue-Based Ethics Approach

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Abstract

Few scholars have investigated the considerations of over-empowered teams (i.e., teams creating negative organizational outcomes from too much empowerment) from a non-consequential ethics approach. Leveraging a virtue-based ethics lens of team empowerment, we provide a framework of team ethical orientation and over-empowerment using highly influential market research teams as a basis for our analysis. The purpose of this research is to contrast how teams founded on virtue-based ethics (such as diligence, integrity, honesty) can attenuate ethical dilemmas and negative organizational outcomes from team over-empowerment. We provide a framework of four conditions that include Sophisticated, Suppressed, Contagion, and Impeded to discuss alignment between team ethical orientation and team empowerment. Through this framework, we aim to further our understanding of empowered team behavior between action that is virtuous, moral, and ethical and activity that threatens organizational values and goals.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Management Department, College of Business, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, USA

    Terry R. Adler & Dina Denney

  2. Sykes College of Business, University of Tampa, Tampa, USA

    Thomas G. Pittz

  3. Management Department, College of Business, Purdue University—Ft. Wayne, Fort Wayne, USA

    Hank B. Strevel

  4. Management Department, College of Business, University of Tampa, Tampa, USA

    Susan D. Steiner

  5. United States Air Force, Tinker Air Force Base, OK, USA

    Elizabeth S. Adler

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  1. Terry R. Adler
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  2. Thomas G. Pittz
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  6. Elizabeth S. Adler
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Adler, T.R., Pittz, T.G., Strevel, H.B. et al. Team Over-Empowerment in Market Research: A Virtue-Based Ethics Approach. J Bus Ethics 176, 159–173 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04702-2

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