The Greek philosopher Aristotle, writing over two thousand years before Wall Street, called people who engaged in activities which did not contribute to society "parasites." In his latest work, renowned scholar Robert C. Solomon asserts that though capitalism may require capital, but it does not require, much less should it be defined by the parasites it inevitably attracts. Capitalism has succeeded not with brute strength or because it has made people rich, but because it has produced responsible citizens and--however unevenly--prosperous (...) communities. It cannot tolerate a conception of business that focuses solely on income and vulgarity while ignoring traditional virtues of responsibility, community, and integrity. Many feel that there is too much lip-service and not enough understanding of the importance of cooperation and integrity in corporate life. This book rejects the myths and metaphors of war-like competition that cloud business thinking and develops an "Aristotelean" theory of business. The author's approach emphasizes several core concepts: the corporation as community, the search for excellence, the importance of integrity and sound judgment, as well as a more cooperative and humane vision of business. Solomon stresses the virtues of honesty, trust, fairness, and compassion in the competitive business world, and confronts the problem of "moral mazes" and what he posits as its solution--moral courage. (shrink)

This paper reviews and analyses the implications of citizenship thinking for building ethical institutional arrangements for business. The paper looks at various stakeholder groups whose relation with the company changes quite significantly when one starts to conceptualize it in terms of citizenship. Rather than being simply stakeholders, we could see those groups either as citizens, or as other constituencies participating in the administration of citizenship for others, or in societal governance more broadly. This raises crucial questions about accountability and democracy (...) in stakeholder relations with the corporation. We sketch out the main currents informing and emerging from the citizenship perspective on firm-stakeholder relations; analyze specific stakeholder groups and their particular relevance in the context of a citizenship perspective; and conclude with a discussion of the broader implications in terms of building ethical institutions. (shrink)

. American businesses and corporate executives are faced with a serious problem the loss of public confidence. Public criticism, increased government controls, and growing expectations for improved financial performance and accountability have accompanied this decline in trust. Traditional approaches to corporate governance, typified by agency theory and stakeholder theory, have been expensive to direct and have focused on short-term profits and organizational systems that fail to achieve desired results. We explain why the organizational governance theories are fundamentally, inadequate to build (...) trust. We advance a conceptual framework based on stewardship theory characterized by “covenantal relationships” and argue that design of governance mechanisms using a covenantal approach is more effective in building trust in organizations. A covenantal relationship is a specialized form of a relational contract between an employee and his or her organization. We argue that regardless of incentives and control mechanisms carefully designed through contractual mechanisms, in the absence of covenantal relationships it is extremely difficult to build trust within organizations. We propose that organizations are more likely to build trust – both at the organizational level and at the interpersonal level – when they create reinforcing and integrated systems that honor implied duties of “covenantal relationships.”. (shrink)

Great leaders are ethical stewards who generate high levels of commitment from followers. In this paper, we propose that perceptions about the trustworthiness of leader behaviors enable those leaders to be perceived as ethical stewards. We define ethical stewardship as the honoring of duties owed to employees, stakeholders, and society in the pursuit of long-term wealth creation. Our model of relationship between leadership behaviors, perceptions of trustworthiness, and the nature of ethical stewardship reinforces the importance of ethical governance in dealing (...) with employees and in creating organizational systems that are congruent with espoused organizational values. (shrink)

Workplace bullying has a well-established body of research internationally, but the United States has lagged behind the rest of the world in the identification and investigation of this phenomenon. This paper presents a managerial perspective on bullying in organizations. The lack of attention to the concept of workplace dignity in American organizational structures has supported and even encouraged both casual and more severe forms of harassment that our workplace laws do not currently cover. The demoralization victims suffer can create toxic (...) working environments and impair organizational productivity. Some methods of protecting your organization from this blight of bullying are proposed. Bullying has always been part of the human condition; history is rife with references to abuse of power and unnecessary or excessive force. The classic bully story is of Joseph and his brothers, a tale of envy and hostility. The refinement of bullying to include various forms of legally defined social harassment is a relatively late phenomenon, however, dating to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the United States, bullying is not illegal, whereas it is illegal in many other countries. Bullying is not about benign teasing, nor does it include the off-color jokes, racial slurs, or unwelcome advances that are the hallmarks of legally defined harassment. Workplace bullying is the pattern of destructive and generally deliberate demeaning of co-workers or subordinates that reminds us of the activities of the schoolyard bully. Unlike the schoolyard bully, however, the workplace bully is an adult, usually (but not always) aware of the impact of his or her behavior on others. Bullying in the workplace, often tacitly accepted by the organizational leadership, can create an environment of psychological threat that diminishes corporate productivity and inhibits individual and group commitment. The two examples that follow will help to clarify the difference between harassment and bullying. (shrink)

Corporate scandals have assumed epidemic proportions. All around the globe, even renowned organizations have been felled from their high pedestals by the misdeeds of their leaders. This raises an intriguing question: How do such resourceful organizations end up with crass ‹impostors’ as leaders in the first place? The answer perhaps lies in the misplaced emphasis on certain qualities we associate with leadership. True leadership requires a balance among three elemental pre-requisites: Energy, Expertise and Integrity. When they are synchronized, they unleash (...) the latent potential in any organization. Out of these three interacting gears of leadership, it is Integrity that ensures that an organization is run in the right direction – with a view towards collective good rather than selfish motives. Therefore, it is the most non-negotiable of the three elements. Henceforth, leaders ought not to be selected on the basis of the superficial qualities that have blinded us in the past. They must first pass the acid test of Integrity. This article suggests a ‹decision tree’ and a ‹checklist’ to help in the selection process. (shrink)

In this brief book one of the most distinguished living American philosophers takes up the question of whether ethical judgments can properly be considered ...

Bullying is a serious problem in today’s workplace, in that, a large percentage of employees have either been bullied or knows someone who has. There are a variety of ethical concerns dealing with bullying—that is, courses of action to manage the bullying contain serious ethical/legal concerns. The inadequacies of legal protections for bullying in the U.S. workplace also compound the approaches available to deal ethically with bullying. While Schumann (2001, Human Resource Management Review 11, 93–111) does not explicitly examine bullying, (...) the five moral principles that he advocates can be applied to judge the ethics of bullying in the workplace. A possible limitation of this model is that, it is designed to be normative (judgmental), and while it does take into consideration the relationships among the victim, the perpetrator, the groups in the organization, and the organization itself in judging the ethics of bullying, it does not explicitly consider the process by which bullying might develop and persist. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the dynamics of this process, Nijhof and Rietdijk (1999, Journal of Business Ethics 20(1), 39–50)) suggest applying an A–B–C (antecedents, behaviors, and consequences) model to help understand the dynamics of bullying in the workplace. Formal propositions are offered to guide both academics and practitioners to an enriched understanding of the ethics of workplace bullying. (shrink)

This article explores the relational and motivational leadership behaviors that may promote stewardship in organizations. I conceptualize stewardship as an outcome of leadership behaviors that promote a sense of personal responsibility in followers for the long-term wellbeing of the organization and society. Building upon the themes presented in the stewardship literature, such as identification and intrinsic motivation, and drawing from other research streams to include factors such as interpersonal and institutional trust and moral courage, I posit that leaders foster stewardship (...) in their followers through various relational, motivational, and contextually supportive leadership behaviors. (shrink)

Establishes the intellectual foundations of a new movement in American thought: communitarianism. Emerging in part as a response to the excesses of American individualism, communitarianism seeks to restore the balance between individual rights and social responsibilities.

The events of 9/11 set in motion a massive reordering of U.S. policy. We propose that the American public's response to this redirection in policy derives, in part, from ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism - prejudice, broadly conceived - refers to the commonplace human tendency to partition the social world into virtuous in-groups and nefarious out-groups. Support for the war on terrorism, undertaken against a strange and shadowy enemy, should hold special appeal for Americans with an ethnocentric turn of mind. To see if (...) this is so, we analyze the panel component of the 2000-2002 National Election Study. We find that ethnocentrism powerfully underwrites support for the war on terrorism, across a variety of tests and specifications, and the strength of the relationship between ethnocentrism and opinion is influenced in part by the extraordinary events of 9/11. Ethnocentrism is easily found among Americans, but its relevance and potency for politics depends, we suggest, upon circumstance. (shrink)