Sensitivity to the Ethics of Operations

Abstract

Ethical wrongdoing in organizations is ubiquitous and costly for organizations, their members, and the people they serve. Despite attempts to address wrongdoing through legal, structural, and social means, much work still needs to be done before scholars can begin to prescribe long-term solutions for these problems. Organizational learning scholarship seeks to identify the antecedents and consequences of rapidly detecting and correcting errors in organizations. Conceptually, errors are similar to the problems generated by ethical wrongdoing. Organizational learning frameworks, when applied to moral errors, may provide insight into the nature and solutions for ethical wrongdoing in organizations. This study utilizes ethically reliable organizing (ERO) theory, a communication ethics theory of organizational moral learning, to hypothesize relationships between an organization’s cultural sensitivity to the ethics of its operations, communicative predictors of this sensitivity (e.g., upward ethical dissent and leader listening), and ethics-related organizational outcomes (e.g., moral learning behaviors, ethical safety organizing, incivility, and deviance). After scale development and validation for a measure of sensitivity to the ethics of operations, data were collected from a cross-sectional sample of US-based working adults. Results indicated that prosocial and repetition forms of upward ethical dissent and employee perceptions of leader listening positively predict sensitivity to the ethics of operations, which, in turn, positively predicts moral learning behaviors and ethical safety organizing and negatively predicts incivility. Additional results from path modeling are provided. Implications for ERO theory, organizational dissent, organizational listening, and organizational ethics are discussed. Limitations and future research directions are included.