Most professionals have the arduous task of managing their own dual loyalty: in one contextual relationship, they are members of a profession while simultaneously they are employed as members of a locally established organisation. This sense of a dual loyalty has to be taken into account when professional bureaucracies develop ethics programmes. This article focuses on universities. Accounting for the dual loyalty of academic professionals, it is the objective of the study to contribute to the most appropriate ethics programmes in (...) such an academic context. Based on a review of the literature, we identify which ethical issues commonly emerge in educational and research activities. Then we offer a conceptual analysis of the conditions required for each different strategy of ethics management. We argue that none of the four theoretically derived strategies is applicable solely on its own. For universities it is most promising to design ethics programmes based on the guiding values of the academic community, including integrity measures for universities and corrective measures for students. The argument developed in this article is assumed to be widely applicable in assessing the appropriateness of ethics management strategies in other professional settings. (shrink)

At the centre of responsible management (RM) learning is the development of managerial competence for ethics, responsibility, and sustainability (ERS). Important contributions have been made from each: the ethics, responsibility, and sustainability disciplines. However, we are yet to integrate these disciplinary contributions into a comprehensive interdisciplinary RM competence framework that corresponds to the interdisciplinary nature of RM challenges. We address this priority in this paper and report on the findings of an integrative structured literature review of 224 management competence articles (...) across the ERS disciplines. Our thematic template analysis has produced an interdisciplinary RM competence framework of three layers of personal, behavioural, and intellectual competences and independent and interdependent competence dimensions. The resulting 3 × 2 competence matrix framework accommodates 33 interdisciplinary ERS competence themes and 90 subthemes in the six competence domains of _being_ and _becoming_, _acting_ and _interacting_, _knowing_ and _thinking_. To the RM discussion, we contribute an interdisciplinary competence framework that enables the development of responsible managers who tackle the inherently interdisciplinary issues of RM. To the competence discussion, we contribute the interdependent competence dimension and future research directions through the lens of response-ability. _JBE Section:_ Business Ethics Learning and Education. (shrink)

Promoting ethical practice within an organization has been a continuous challenge in the business ethics community. To enrich organizational practices for promoting business ethics across an organization, this paper aims to introduce the voices of practitioners working in organizations that offer exemplary practices. Based on semi-structured interviews with 21 engineers working in the health products industry, we identified 12 pervasive ethical values that we grouped to four categories: fiduciary, economic, engineering, and process values. As ethics has been embraced as a (...) core element of the ethical practice of our study participants regardless of their rankings and roles in their organizations, we investigated organizational strategies for promoting ethical practice. We identified four categories of organizational strategies: symbols, memberships, practices, and systems. Each strategy affected the 12 ethical values in different ways. Lastly, we identified three characteristics of the industry contexts that appeared to influence ethical values: customer impact, economic norms, and highly regulated industry. We discuss how the findings from this paper can potentially promote new discussions and practices in the business ethics community. (shrink)

The paper develops a responsibility-based account of professional ethics in banking. From this perspective, bankers have duties not only toward clients—the traditional focus of professional ethics—but also regarding the prevention of systemic harms to whole societies. When trying to fulfill these duties, bankers have to meet three challenges: epistemic challenges, motivational challenges, and a coordination challenge. These challenges can best be met by a combination of regulation and ethics that aligns responsibilities, recognition, and incentives and creates what Parsons has called (...) “integrated situations”. Professional associations play an important role for this purpose, especially as spaces in which peer recognition is earned. But financial incentives equally need to be brought in line, for example, through deferred bonuses or claw backs. Such measures can create a new culture of accountability in banking. (shrink)