Few scholars have investigated the considerations of over-empowered teams 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 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. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop an ethical framework for the marketing of corporate social responsibility. Methods The approach is a conceptual one based on virtue ethics and on the corporate identity literature. Furthermore, empirical research results are used to describe the opportunities and pitfalls of using marketing communication tools in the strategy of building a virtuous corporate brand. Results/conclusions An ethical framework that addresses the paradoxical relation between the consequentialist perspective many proponents of the marketing of (...) CSR adopt, and ethical perspectives which criticize an exclusive profit-oriented approach to CSR. Furthermore, three CSR strategies in relation to the marketing of CSR are discussed. For each CSR strategy it is explored how a corporation could avoid falling into the promise/performance gap. (shrink)

Companies that contribute to charitable organizations rightly hope that their philanthropic work will also be good for the bottom line. Marketers of good corporate conduct must be especially careful, however, to market such conduct in a morally acceptable fashion. Although marketers typically engage in mild deception or take artistic license when marketing goods and services, these sorts of practices are far more morally troublesome when used to market good corporate conduct. I argue that although mild deception is not substantially worrisome (...) with respect to the marketing of most goods and services, it is a far greater moral blunder to use such methods in the marketing of good corporate character. These erode trust and demonstrate alack of adequate respect for the moral good. In light of these concerns, I suggest that such practices must be re-examined when applied to the marketing of corporate character and good conduct. Finally, I develop a revised set of ethical guidelines that are needed in order to address the problems peculiar to the marketing of morally praiseworthy behavior. (shrink)

Pricing policies and fair-trade practices are critical for sustaining commercial relationships between firms and customers. Nevertheless, in current business practices, fairness has been mistakenly reduced to a minimalistic ethic wherein justice only demands legal and explicit norms to which commercial parties voluntarily agree. Aimed at giving a different explanation of commercial agreements, this paper will introduce a Virtue Ethics (VE) explanation of the relationship between pricing and the common good by taking up classical concepts related to justice in commerce. In (...) particular, we will explore three principles associated with the notion of fairness in commerce as defined in Neo-Aristotelian ethics towards a relationship between a common good and justice in pricing, i.e., proportionality, benevolence and well-being. To exemplify how these criteria of justice apply to decision-making in commercial practices, we will discuss several cases of fair and unfair commercial relationships. (shrink)

For Aristotle, virtues are neither transcendent nor universal, but socially interdependent; they need to be understood chronologically and with respect to character and context. This paper uses an Aristotelian lens to analyse an especially interesting context in which to study virtue—the state’s response when social order breaks down. During such periods, questions relating to right action by citizens, the state, and state agents are pronounced. To study this, we analyse data from interviews, observation, and documents gathered during a 3-year study (...) of riot policing in the U.K. In doing so, we contribute by joining a number of other conversations within JBE, suggesting detailed empirical examination of this context is useful in opening up considerations relevant to ‘virtue’ elsewhere. This extreme context helps us raise interesting and empirically informed questions that can encourage future theoretical and empirical contributions to virtue in business ethics. One such question is on the role of habituation in virtue, which is not just the inculcation of a reflex or automaticity, but can also refer to a trained and developed tendency to behave in the right way, for the right reasons, at the right time. Whilst we stop short of a simplistic alignment of habituation and virtue, we show ways in which it can inform understanding of both courage and phronēsis. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between CEO incentives and strong and weak corporate social performance. Using the KLD database we find that incentives have no significant relationship with strong social performance. Salary and long-term incentives have a positive association with weak social performance.

Virtue ethics is generally recognized as one of the three major schools of ethics, but is often waylaid by utilitarianism and deontology in business and management literature. EBSCO and ABI databases were used to look for articles in the Journal of Citation Reports publications between 1980 and 2011 containing the keywords ‘virtue ethics’, ‘virtue theory’, or ‘virtuousness’ in the abstract and ‘business’ or ‘management’ in the text. The search was refined to draw lists of the most prolific authors, the most (...) cited authors, the most cited articles, and the journals with the most virtue ethics publications. This information allows one to chart how virtue ethics articles have evolved through the decades and to establish ‘schools’ or clusters of authors as well as clusters of themes. The results of this quantitative analysis of authors, ‘schools’, themes, and publications provide a foundation for the future study of virtue ethics in business and management, identifying its achievements and potentials. (shrink)