This article argues that attempting to overcome moral silence in organizations will require management to move beyond a compliance-oriented organizational culture toward a culture based on integrity. Such cultural change is part of good corporate governance that aims to steer an organization to enhance creativity and moral excellence, and thus organizational value. Governance mechanisms can be either formal or informal. Formal codes and other internal formal regulations that emphasize compliance are necessary, although informal mechanisms that are based on relationship-building are (...) more likely to achieve moral excellence. Such a shift can be viewed as a transformative strategy for overcoming the destructive side effects and business risks of the tendency within corporate cultures to remain mute when faced with issues that violate personal or corporate values. Genuine dialogues and appropriate ethical decisionmaking training can deepen the understanding and create a mindful awareness (of ethical values) and induce trust that embrace both complying with rules and regulations, as well as inciting creative "ethical innovation" with respect to human interaction in multinational companies. (shrink)

The organizational trust literature relies strongly on the notion of trust and trustworthiness as a calculative cause-and-effect relationship aimed at assessing the advantages and disadvantages between two actors. This utilitarian notion of trust has been critiqued by studies that highlight _construct inconsistencies_ related to utilitarian trust, which, it is argued, is deficient, incomplete and misleading. Our empirical study of the Dutch insurance sector identifies and categorizes three _process inconsistencies_ that help to explain why the calculation of trust in a utilitarian (...) sense is seemingly impossible in practice and is a barrier to the unambiguous assessment of individual needs and individual utility. These process inconsistencies successively concern insufficient information, complex behavioural dynamics, and a convoluted pattern of stakeholder influence to assess utility in trust relationships, specifically within complex socio-economic systems. Our findings contribute to the trust literature by proposing a classification of the previous critiques on utilitarian trust, and by showing that in scenarios of systematic rather than dyadic trust, process inconsistencies may be too strong to endure a ‘leap of faith’, at least with regard to suspension and assessing utilitarian trust in these more complex socio-economic systems. (shrink)

Markets, corporations, shareholding, management, law, and ethics are all human constructs. A human element seems essential to their existence. Yet, the predominant conception of shareholders as used in academia as well as the business world is thin, generic, and inanimate. This article argues that a thick conception of shareholders as human beings is needed to legitimize and improve managerial decision making under value pluralism, accurately reflect empirical reality of capital markets, and meet moral demands to respect the dignity of the (...) human person. Drawing on the philosophical idea of thick evaluative concepts, the article explores how this idea can be applied to shareholders and begins to examine some of the implications of considering shareholders’ humanity for the responsibilities of and relationships between managers and shareholders. (shrink)

I argue for the role of trust and cooperation as part of the foundation of digital commerce by expanding the reach of the Integrative Social Contract Theory of Donaldson and Dunfee. I propose that a digital business community can be a community in the morally relevant ways that Donaldson and Dunfee describe, and that the basic framework of ISCT can apply to the digital business world similarly to its application in the offline business world. I then analyze the roles of (...) trust and cooperation in e-commerce, showing how they are important to the digital business community and explaining their moral relevance under a digital form of ISCT. I use the ISCT framework to show that trust and cooperation are an instantiation of the hypernorm of necessary social efficiency, and that authentic microsocial norms developed for the ends of trust and cooperation carry moral responsibility. (shrink)

Solidarity could be defined in the broad sense either as a means or as an end. Considered as an end, solidarity is the motive of any virtuous action based on altruistic reasons, such as helping others to rescue someone in order to prevent a harmful situation. E. g. contributing to lift and rescue a heavy person, lying unconscious in the street on the floor, who is being handled by rescuers, but who might be needing an additional person, could express the (...) value of solidarity as an end, since an answer to others request for help is given in the situation of emergency and risk, without having a particular obligation to help. Solidarity as a means (to an end, not an end), could be understood as a property of dependency of a set of parts to a whole (in solidum), as when in a family or a professional group, individual and collective roles and responsibilities are melt together to some extent.This idea of benefiting others could be understood either as a way of sharing together moral sentiments as love, social virtues as friendship and shared commitments and common economic and educational interests, in a limited community circle, that of the family. Even if the division of labour is not simply based on patriarchal authority, mutual consent of family members to rules and to a common circle of interests, those of the family, resemble to a egoism of the group, and not yet to truly social and altruistic values. Solidarity as cohesion of human beings, by the means of "interchangeability of ideas, services, goods, of workforce, virtues and vices", is solidarity limited to the constitution of a process of exchange that is a means that could be used to different ends. (shrink)