This study expands the application of deonance theory into organizations’ upper echelons by examining how CEOs imprinted with a sense of duty can influence managerial decision-making. We hypothesize an imprint of bounded autonomy, an ought-force that constrains their decision-making and understanding of behavioral freedom, influences duty-bound CEOs to self-report errors in past financial reporting. We test deonance theory propositions of instrumentality for behavioral expansion, namely loss avoidance and gain attainment, related to institutional ownership concentration and CEO equity ownership. We use (...) CEOs that are graduates of U.S. service academies as a proxy for duty-bound executives and find firms they lead are more likely to issue a financial restatement to correct a previous reporting error. This finding is robust to alternate explanations such as being error-prone, earnings management, auditor oversight, and risk behaviors. We also find evidence that deonance may be subject to behavioral expansion. The likelihood of issuing a restatement decreases as institutional ownership concentration and CEO equity ownership increases. This study shows imprinted deonance within the C-suite influences important organizational outcomes. (shrink)

Phillip Cam recently published a study on the separation between the teaching and learning of classic school curriculum on the one hand and morality on the other. He suggests an approach to integrate them. The goal of this article was to suggest a complementary alternative approach, to Cam’s. Based on a MacIntyrean paradigm, I argue that seeing the CSC as ‘practices’ would also enable that integration. This approach differs from the one proposed by Cam, since it preserves the structure of (...) the CSC. Nevertheless, I will demonstrate how this approach leads to a number of changes in the formation, teaching and learning of school curriculum. As background, I will briefly describe R.S. Peters’ attempt to find an internal justification for the teaching and learning of school curriculum and point to some weaknesses it contains. My proposal can be understood as deriving from the same principle, of another famous educational initiative, Mortimer Adler’s ‘Great Book Project’. Toward the end of the article, I will demonstrate why Adler’s project differs from mine, and why it does not meet the goal of integrating learning school curriculum with moral education. (shrink)

The objective of the present study is to compare the effect of three moral education models: the bag-of-virtues, value-clarification, and virtue-ethics models. Students from military colleges in Taiwan were used as research samples, and a questionnaire survey with counterbalanced designs was conducted. The research results indicate that the value-clarification model exhibited lower educational effectiveness than the other two models did, but the virtue-ethics model increased student moral behavior, and the bag-of-virtues model facilitated the construction of student moral values. Additionally, the (...) students rated the bag-of-virtues model as the most educationally effective among the three models. (shrink)

Professions have a social obligation to ensure that their members’ professional behavior is morally appropriate. The psychology profession in most jurisdictions delegates the responsibility of ensuring that psychologists entering the profession are ethically competent to pre-practicum training programs. Educators responsible for teaching the ethics courses in these programs often base them on Rest’s (1984, 1994) theory that does not take into account a vast amount of contemporary psychological and neuroscientific research data on moral decision making. My aim with this article (...) is therefore to summarize the psychological and neuroscience research findings relevant to moral decision making and consider how educators who teach ethics courses can apply them in developing ethics courses grounded in research. (shrink)