Business and Professional Ethics Journal

In this article, we propose to comprehend the corruption mechanisms of tender bidding processes in terms of Human Resource Management (HRM) practices within informal networks. Taking the context of Kazakhstan, we analyze the behavior of individual actors as members of informal networks. Our analysis shows that both corruption and anti-corruption mechanisms can be explained in terms of HRM practices such as (camouflaged) recruitment (e.g., of powerful government officials via network ties), compensation (e.g., kickbacks for corruption; social recognition or shame for anti-corruption) and performance management (e.g., demonstrative punishment for corruption; extreme formalization, peer pressure or social sanctions for anti-corruption).

B Corporations are for-profit companies meeting specific social and environmental standards. This exploratory study into B Corporations aims to enhance the understanding of the certification on organizational performance. As previous research indicates that third party labels impact financial performance and that positive corporate social performance can lead to positive financial performance, this paper first seeks to determine whether B Corporation Certification positively impacts companies’ financial performance. Second, following previous B Corporation literature, this research tests whether certification leads to positive non-financial results in the form of strategic advantages. Finally, it asks whether Certification negatively impacts organizations’ plans to develop internationally and/or by going public. While this study’s results provide little support that B Corporation Certification impacts organizations’ financial performance or growth, they do indicate that B Corporations experience positive non-financial strategic results post certification. The results of this study may be used to infer or test conclusions about socially responsible labels more broadly in the future.

More than half of the S&P 500 and the Fortune 500 companies publish corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. CSR is at the heart of a new form of corporation, the benefit corporation, which requires the pursuit of a social purpose as well as pursuit of profit. Thirty-four states, plus the District of Columbia, have enacted benefit corporation legislation. Most laws require that benefit corporations publish reports on their social purpose performance using a third-party assessment format. The purpose of this paper is to analyze 1,530 benefit corporations identified by B Lab and the state of Minnesota for proof of social purpose performance, as demonstrated in reports on their websites. The study found some companies with excellent reports, but those had had a CSR focus prior to becoming benefit corporations or had been Certified B Corporations. However, most benefit corporations in the study had no published reports; many have no websites.

This essay offers an interrogation of Leadership-as-Practice (LAP) in the context of MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. LAP is a constructionist leadership approach that rationalizes leadership as the co-creation of embodied leadership practices in organizations, and we argue that its theoretical and philosophical foundations are best aligned with a genealogist version of moral enquiry. We contend that LAP’s theoretical assumptions and implications place it in opposition to traditionalist and encyclopaedist moral philosophies and that application of LAP without an appreciation for our argument poses challenges for practitioners as it diminishes their ability to learn from opposing perspectives. We argue for an appreciation of diverse moral viewpoints and discouragement of coercive moral practices from any competing perspective. While the philosophy undergirding LAP may encourage moral relativism and possible conflicts in principled beliefs, we offer LAP may strengthen organizational members cognitively and emotionally, bringing greater long-term benefit for the organization.

Here we provide an overview of some of the central ethical issues related to the use of surgical robots. Subsequently we introduce an anticipatory ethical analysis of possible consequences for the use of robotic surgery. Anticipatory ethics aims at identifying ethical problems with emerging technologies while they are at the introductory stages for a wide range of stakeholders. Robotic surgery presents a range of positive possibilities, which include treating patients more safely and effectively to caring for patients with telesurgery at remote locations. However, injuries and deaths caused by robotic surgical platforms (RSPs) pose roadblocks to full realization of this technology. Investment in RSPs by for-profits like hospitals requires a detailed stakeholder analysis that takes into account both institutional and patient perspectives. It will take carefully crafted policy and regulation based upon sound technical and ethical analysis to induce the widespread adoption of this surgical method.

Woiceshyn (2011) showed that leaders who exhibit rational egoistic behaviors not only make decisions that lead to organizational success, but that these decisions are also ethical. Woiceshyn’s ethical decision-making model consists of seven fundamental virtues associated with rational egoism: rationality, productiveness, justice, independence, honesty, integrity, and pride. In this paper, we define the rational egoism construct using a virtues-based ethical framework. We compare and contrast the seven virtues under rational egoism with alternative interpretations that arise under altruism, deontology, and teleology in order to further refine the construct. Based on this analysis, we conceptualize rational egoism as a Type II second-order formative model and develop a scale based on the seven underlying virtues. Through the use of partial least squares path modelling (PLS-PM), we validate this on a sample of 534 full-time American workers. We then demonstrate that this rational egoism construct has a strong, positive relationship to the transformational leadership construct. Implications for practice are discussed and areas for future study are suggested.

In this study, we investigate the impact of frequent service learning on the emotional, personal development, and leadership characteristics of business students at a Catholic university in the United States. We examine the aforementioned impact of frequent service learning through a novel panel data set provided by the University’s Institute for Leadership and Service, ranging from the years 2008 through 2015. Specifically, we conduct an empirical analysis across the emotional, personal development, and leadership dimensions, and examine the too-much-of-a-good-thing (TMGT) effect of Pierce and Aguinis (2013) in relation to service learning. Our results suggest that business students experience statistically significant increases in several emotional, personal development, and leadership dimensions as the number of service learning experiences increases. We provide mixed evidence of the TMGT effect when aggregating the emotion and personal development dimensions against the number of service-learning experiences via examination of cross-dimensional averages. Our study yields implications for the optimal number of service learning projects for business schools.

Conflicts of interest represent one of the defining problems of our time, and yet a clear definition of what constitutes a conflict of interest remains elusive. To move us closer to resolving this problem, this article first reviews and critiques attempts to define conflicts of interest, and, second, uses these critiques to ground a more conceptually consistent and practically useful definition. This definition builds on, but also breaks away from Michael Davis’s (1982) definition of conflicts of interest. Specifically, it articulates and defends defining conflicts of interest in terms of their threat to good judgment but does so in the broadest terms. Defining it in this way expands the domain of conflicts of interest, but also avoids unnecessary conceptual distractions and practical difficulties.

Many business and government institutions appear to have failed in meeting society’s expectations of them. Continuing scandals and failures, as well as an increasingly obvious lack of responsibility to customers, have caused communities to question the probity and operation of these organisations. Consequently, “social licence to operate” is becoming an increasingly common process and one which demands a change in management philosophy and behaviour in our institutions. Improving the quality of responsible management practice is a critical element in this new management philosophy, and which demands an intense focus on including ethical considerations in the core management competence of decision-making. We draw on a combined 100-plus years of international consulting experience, “C“ and senior executive work experience, and academic research to present a practical framework for responsible management practice which, we believe, can also form the foundation for the required organisational cultural transformation required of many existing organisations.

Regulation of gatekeepers of taxation has been so controversial and important that a review of ethical standards, professional responsibility and industry guidelines is examined. This paper explores whether gatekeepers of taxation need more ethics and enforcement to increase the compliance rate. In this paper we argue that an effective mixture of professional ethics and enforcement of gatekeepers can increase tax compliance. However, we question how much is optimal or reasonable? We theorize that ethics and enforcement should be proportionate to the ecosystem because too much of it can lead to unintended consequences such as increase costs and higher noncompliance. A friendlier tax authority with less complex laws can enhance the compliance process. This strategy, in amalgamation with professional ethics, enforcement policies, and effective reporting systems, could increase the compliance rate.

With rapid growth in Far Eastern economies (in particular China’s), it is becoming imperative to understand the culturally driven ethical-value underpinnings of the management processes in this region of the world. In this study, we propose a broadened version of Hofstede’s and others’ conception of Confucian dynamics anchored in his teachings preserved in the Lunyu (or Analects), which form the foundation of individual-social moral interactions. Based on a content analysis of these Analects via a qualitative software, NVivo, we identified six work-based values (Leadership Attributes, Appropriate Conduct, Authority Protocol, Governance Policies, Long term Orientation and Collegiality and Teamwork) and six life-based values (Virtuousness and Appropriate Behavior, Handling Life’s Emotions, Learning and Teaching, Parent/Elder Relationship, Friendship and Worship) of the society, prescribed by Confucius in his Analects. These factors are further analyzed and mapped in the context of the three Confucian ethical dimensions (Yi or Righteousness, Li or Propriety, and Ren or Benevolence and Unbounded). The business implications of the results and directions for future research are finally discussed.

This paper outlines the academic architecture of CityLab as graduate program course initiative and Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) capstone exemplar. When the United Nations launched the Millennium Goals in 2000 to focus global development on humanity rather than GDP, the Global Compact was launched as a collateral effort, challenging business, government, and social sector leaders to transform the global economic system. In 2007, the Six PRME focused on business schools, challenging them to reorient their curricula towards preparing students to lead the world in building “an inclusive and sustainable economy.” CityLab is an example of innovating the learning experience and challenging learners to take leadership roles in efforts to enhance the value of livable cities as the foundation of an inclusive and sustainable global economy for the Urban Century.

With the expansion of clientele’s demographics and international transactions, many law firms began to open doors to non-mainstreamers—minority lawyers to join the legal workforce. Decades have passed and the inequality in compensation between minority and non-minority attorneys is still one of the most controversial issues in the legal profession. Based on human capital and labor discrimination theory, we examine the productivity and compensation differences between minority attorneys and non-minority counterparts. The sample consists of 554 firm-year observations of the 200 largest U.S law firms from 2013 to 2016. We use OLS with clustered standard errors by year. We find minority partners are more likely to provide relatively routine and template-based services, which do not command fee premium, which results in low productivity of minority partners. We find that minority partners are compensated less than their non-minority counterparts after controlling for productivity. This paper aids in the understanding of diversity in the workplace and the effect of diversity on a firms’ productivity and the type of services to provide. Also, this paper has implications on the compensation gap between minorities and their non-minority counterparts.

In recent years, the US, UK, and Continental Europe have pursued board gender diversity through markedly different means. Several European countries have imposed mandatory quotas, whereas the UK and US are relying on the endogenous mechanisms of social pressure and shareholder proposals respectively. Despite their obvious allure as a means of bringing about rapid change, evidence is mounting that European board gender diversity quotas may yield various deleterious side effects; and quotas may not be as successful in their core aim of promoting gender diversity as initial broad statistical measures indicated. In this paper we critique the European quota regime, and consider US shareholder proposals as an alternative change mechanism for improving gender diversity in corporate boards. We note the lack of shareholder representative democracy in Europe and conclude with the policy recommendation that, rather than extending quotas, European governments should focus on empowering shareholders.

Corrupt, unethical and imprudent practices in the global banking sector have been identified as among the causes of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). In this paper I (1) provide an analysis of institutional corruption that enables institutional corruption within the global banking sector to be (a) viewed in relation to economic injustice, and (b) demarcated from the unfortunate consequences of unavoidably risky market-based activity, poor judgment, ill-informed policy-making etc.; (2) argue for an understanding of and response to institutional corruption in the global banking sector that is holistic i.e., focuses on institutional purpose, industry structure and banking culture rather than simply structure or culture; and (3) argue for an account of moral responsibility for corruption and economic injustice in the global banking sector, and for combating it, in terms of meta-collective responsibility, a specific notion of collective moral responsibility that does not allow individual human actors to evade responsibility.

The concept of “auditor independence”—that the provider of assurance on financial information should be free of conflicting interests—is deeply embedded in the world’s capital markets. This paper examines stresses on the global model of Big Audit that call into question both the basis and the ongoing usefulness of auditor independence: The threats to the stability of the model, based on the dominance of the Big Four international accounting networks in providing audit services to the world’s large public companies. The balance between benefits and detriments of the independence requirements, and standards that are difficult to articulate and enforce. The implications for the continued value of independent assurance emerging from the evolution in Big Data tools and analytics, including the structural constraints of regulation. A broad re-examination is called for, in aide of the design of a sustainable public-company assurance model that is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century.