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Supererogation: Beyond Positive Deviance and Corporate Social Responsibility

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Abstract

The special class of supererogatory actions—those that go “beyond the call of duty”—has thus far been omitted from the management literature. Rather, actions of a firm that may surpass economic and legal requirements have been discussed either under the umbrella term of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or the concept of positive deviance as articulated by the Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) movement. This paper seeks to clarify how “duty” is understood in these literatures and makes an argument that paradigmatic examples of corporate supererogation in fact lie beyond what is traditionally conceptualized as CSR and positive deviance. In so doing, this paper contributes to the growing body of research on Positive Organizational Ethics, as well as both the CSR and POS literatures, by presenting an extended deontological framework of CSR and bringing conceptual clarity to an otherwise muddied domain.

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Notes

  1. Underlying this thesis is the understanding that the strategic decisions/actions of the firm are made by people within the organization who are themselves moral agents. However, the unit of analysis herein is the action and not the individual who made the decision to act and hence the level of analysis with regards to duties is at the firm level and not the individual level. Similarly, attributions of supererogation should therefore also be limited to the action, and not to the firm as a whole.

  2. For example, long-standing informal ethical standards were finally codified into law (The Sarbanes–Oxley Act) after the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals.

  3. Carroll refers to the fourth category as “discretionary” in his 1979 paper, however changes this to “philanthropic” in the 1991 paper.

  4. For example, in a series of recent experiments, Knobe (2006) found that moral considerations affect the way in which people judge the actions of the Chairman of the Board. Given a situation where the Chairman clearly states that he does not care about the environment, but is presented with a new program introduction that would increase profits and also help the environment, most subjects said that despite the increase in profits and benefit to the environment, the Chairman did not intentionally help the environment, nor was his action to accept the new program particularly praiseworthy. In the opposite scenario, where the new program presented would increase profits and also harm the environment, the Chairman’s expressed indifference to the environment coupled with his decision to proceed with the program was seen as both intentionally harmful to the environment and blameworthy. Knobe concludes that people are likely to blame the agent if his/her behavior has a bad side-effect, but not likely to praise the agent if his behavior has a good side-effect.

  5. The condition of permissibility (1) places supererogation, in Heyd’s conceptualization, in “one of the three types of actions considered from a moral standpoint: the obligatory, the permissible and the forbidden” (p. 122).

  6. In Carroll’s (1979) social responsiveness model, going beyond the legal requirements in employee relations or environmental issues would likely be considered a “proactive” strategy. In other “continuums” of social or ethical responsibilities, this perspective is also referred to as “beyond compliance” (Neville 2008; Sekerka 2012).

  7. It is possible, therefore that supererogatory actions may not actually lie on the same curve. Although beyond the scope of this paper, it is conceivable that supererogatory actions, by virtue of their rarity, probably do not adhere to Gaussian statistics altogether, but are rather Pareto distributed.

  8. This is in contrast, for example, to the public outcry for Ford’s failure to recall the Pinto when it knew of the gas-tank defect.

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Acknowledgments

The author is indebted to Mary Crossan, Anthony Skelton, Corey Mulvihill, and the special issue reviewers for their thoughtful guidance, comments, and feedback on this project and would like to acknowledge the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation for their financial support.

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  1. IMD, Chemin de Bellerive 23, P.O. Box 915, 1001, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Daina Mazutis

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Mazutis, D. Supererogation: Beyond Positive Deviance and Corporate Social Responsibility. J Bus Ethics 119, 517–528 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1837-5

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