Abstract
Based on analysis of interviews with managers about the ethical questions they face in their work, a typology of morally questionable managerial acts is developed. The typology distinguishes acts committed against-the-firm (non-role and role-failure acts) from those committed on-behalf-of-the-firm (role-distortion and role-as-sertion acts) and draws attention to the different nature of the four types of acts. The argument is made that senior management attention is typically focused on the types of acts which are least problematical for most managers, and that the most troublesome types are relatively ignored.
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References
Bird, Frederick and James A. Waters: 1987, ‘The nature of managerial moral standards’, Journal of Business Ethics 6, No. 1, 1–3.
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James A. Waters was Dean, Graduate School of Management at Boston College. His research interests concerned the process of strategy formation in complex organizations, organizational change and development, and ethics in organizations. His work has been published in such journals as Organizational Dynamics, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Strategic Management Journal, California Management Review, Business Horizons, Journal of Applied Psychology, Business and Society, Canadian Journal of Administrative Science, Advanced Management Journal, Journal of Business Ethics, Organizational Behavior Teaching Review, and numerous anthologies. Dr Waters recently and tragically passed away.
Frederick Bird teaches Comparative Ethics at Concordia University, where he is an associate professor. He has recently written a text on the comparative sociological study of moral systems as well as a number of articles on business ethics and contemporary religious movements.
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Waters, J.A., Bird, F. Attending to ethics in management. J Bus Ethics 8, 493–497 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00381816
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00381816