The assessment of individual moral goodness

• Author: Raymond B. Chiu,Rick D. Hackett
• Published date: 01 January 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/beer.12137
• Date: 01 January 2017

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The assessment of individual moral goodness

Raymond B. Chiu

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Rick D. Hackett

McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada

Correspondence

Raymond B. Chiu, DeGroote School of

Business, McMaster University, 1280 Main

Street West, DSB A210, Hamilton, ON,

Canada L8S 4M4.

Email: chiurb@mcmaster.ca

Funding information

This research was supported in part by the

Canadian Centre for Ethics & Corporate

Policy and the Social Sciences and

Humanities Research Council of Canada,

Grant no. 435-2014-1151.

Abstract

In a field dominated by research on moral prescription (business ethics) and moral prediction

(behavioral ethics), there is poor understanding of the place of moral perceptions in organizations

alongside philosophical ethics and causal models of ethical outcomes. As leadership failures con-

tinue to plague organizational health and firms recognize the wide-ranging impact of subjective

bias, scholars and practitioners need a renewed frameof reference from which to reconceptualize

their current understanding of ethics as perceived in individuals. Based on an assessment and

selection perspective from the field of human resource management, an alternative to conven-

tional deductive-prescriptive approaches is proposed based ona pluralistic concept referred to as

moral goodness.An inductive-descriptivetheory-building frameworkis constructed based on three

interrelated streams of inquiry to yield insight concerning both formal and informal instances of

assessment. Recommendations are proposed for the application of the framework to future

research and practice.

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INTRODUCTION

Evaluations of others with respect to theirethicality or moral character

are frequent and widespread, and often implicit and automatic. In the

context of work, such subjective perceptions can have consequences

for the reputationsof those evaluated and the firms they lead. Surpris-

ingly, we lack a comprehensive and integrative conceptual framework

to explain individuals’perceptions of the ethicality or “moral goodness”

of others withinand across situations—one that recognizes the systems

of meaning and cultural influences that give rise to attributions of

morality. We outline the philosophicalbasis of such a framework here,

one that moves beyond conventionalattempts to prescribe and predict

individual ethics, by adopting an inductive-descriptive theory-building

approach. Our framework draws in particularfrom concepts and meth-

ods employed in assessment and selection from the field of human

resources management. In the end, we believe that our framework will

lead to research that can helpguide managers on how best to address

morally based subjective biases and cultural insensitivities in work-

related assessment.

There are two solitudes in ethics-related management research—

the philosophicalformulation of prescribed normsfor ethical outcomes

(business ethics), and the social scientific study of what leads to such

outcomes (behavioral ethics) (DeGeorge, 2011). In the former field, the

focus is on determining what is right and wrong in business decisions,

often based on philosophically derived ethical theories (Crane & Mat-

ten, 2004). In the latter, efforts to find predictors of ethical outcomes

are reflected in causal models that commonly involve three compo-

nents: individualdifferences, a decision process, and contextual factors

(Brady & Hatch, 1992; Trevi~

no, Weaver, & Reynolds, 2006). Yet ethical

outcomes are not just the sum total of static influences coming from

one’s predispositions or environment, but are rooted in a person’s

dynamic, relational, and socially constructed reality (Astley, 1985;

Painter-Morland, 2008). The implication is that people’s understanding

of morality can vary widely and, as evidenced by broader debates in

moral psychology,its origins could be intuitive and automatic in nature

(Dedeke, 2015; Haidt, 2001; Weaver, Reynolds, & Brown, 2014). We

lack compelling theories and frameworks that can reveal the systems

of meaning and cultural influences out of which this innate sense of

morality arises, or explain the connections that ethical “theory”and

“behavior”have with ethical “perception”(Chen, Velasquez Tuliao,

Cullen, & Chang, 2016; Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012; Thorne & Saun-

ders, 2002).

We argue that a basic challenge posed by the subjective, subcon-

scious, and plural aspects of perception in organizations is to answer

the metaethical question about how individuals are perceived as

“morally good”(Ibarra-Colado, Clegg, Rhodes, & Kornberger, 2006;

McMurray, Pullen, & Rhodes, 2011; Oliver, Statler, & Roos, 2010). The

perceived morality of an individual, or what we refer to as moral good-

ness, resides in a relatively unexplored conceptual domain distinct from

business and behavioral ethics. The disconnect is illustrated thisway: If

there is ethical reasoning that commends a particular moral act for an

individual, and furthermore there is evidence that possessing such

BusinessEthics: A Eur Rev 2017; 26: 31–46 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/beer V

C2016 JohnWiley & Sons Ltd

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Received:26 October 2015

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Revised: 19 June 2016

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Accepted:23 October 2016

DOI 10.1111/beer.12137

ethical reasoning makes it likely the individual will engage in this moral

act, how does one explain the fact that an individual acting in a morally

predictable manner is not always perceived as moral? Moberg illustrates

this problem with a compelling story of how Cynthia Cooper, cele-

brated for blowingthe whistle at WorldCom, suffered the consequence

of bias toward negativeperceptions: “Her salary was frozen, her audit-

ing position authority was circumscribed, and her budget was cut”

(2006, p. 416). The disconnect between moral prescription, prediction,

and perception has parallels in the domain of trust-related research.

According to Colquitt and Rodell (2011) and Holtz (2015), the prevail-

ing assumption that perceptions of justice lead to perceptions of trust

and trustworthiness has been widely assumed, although preliminary

evidence shows that the reverse effect also occurs. For example, per-

ceptions of the integrity dimension of trustworthiness predict all four

justice dimensions reciprocally (Colquitt & Rodell, 2011). Rather than

being based on actual behavior, perceived trustworthiness can be pre-

dicted by facial appearance (Cogsdill, Todorov, Spelke, & Banaji, 2014;

Holtz, 2015) as well as differences in educationand organizational rank

(Lau, Lam, & Salamon,2008).

The challenge for ethicsresearchers is that real-life perceptionsof

ethicality are pluralistic and culturally determined, and hence deserve

scrutiny through more inductive and descriptive forms of inquiry.

When forming impressions of others, perceptions are driven by an

innate human bias toward morality-related rationalizations of others’

conduct, and toward evaluating others more severely than oneself

based on negative instead of positive information (Wojciszke, 2005).

One does not need to look further than the moral outrage fueled by

citizen activism on social media when the dubious deeds of business

leaders are revealed, and the discovery that redemption in the public

eye has much to do with visceral impressions (e.g., of apologies or

atonement) and little to do with intellectual reasoning (Grover & Hasel,

2015; ten Brinke & Adams, 2015; Warren, 2007; Whelan, Moon, &

Grant, 2013). It begs the question about why management research

possesses few frameworks explaining how moral perceptions of indi-

viduals arise or differ, particularly when reputational damage could

have dramatic impacton stakeholder reactions and stock markets (Jan-

ney & Gove, 2011; Warren, 2007; Zhu & Chang, 2013). Only recently

have the substantive aspects of moral perceptions been explored by

researchers. Forexample, Ho (2010) exemplifies the need for inductive

research into unknown cultural factors beyond broad measures of

national culture.She shows that culturally driven obedience to author-

ity, external locus of control, religiosity, relationship orientation, and

face orientation (i.e., maintaining dignity and prestige) have influence

on perceptionsof ethical scenarios depending on the culturalgroup.

This article takes a s tep toward establishin g a space for concept

and theory development regarding perceptions of individual moral

goodness, movin g beyond conventional attempt s to prescribe and pre-

dict individual ethics. We do this by adopting an inductive-descriptive

theory-building framework that facilitates inquiry into the process by

which perceptions of moral goodness become apparent. Through our

philosophical reflections we invite readers to reconceptualize the pre-

suppositions behind current understandings of how and why people

come to see others as morally good. To underscore the relevance of

our framework, wecritically discuss the rational, instrumental, and uni-

tarist themes that characterize current moral, empirical, and paradig-

matic aspects of individual ethics. We then present three alternative

streams of inquiry as components of our proposed framework: the per-

ceptual stream (based on phenomenology), the inferential stream

(based on normative-empirical integration), and the metatheoretical

stream (based on metaparadigm and metaethical theory building).

Finally, we consider the implications of our framework for future

research and practice in assessment- and perception-related research.

Rather than be confinedto conventional tools of businessor behavioral

ethics, we now explain why a human resource management (HRM)

assessment and selection perspective is especially amenable to

research on perception and provides an extensive theoretical and

methodologicalfoundation.

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Assessment and moral goodness

There have been attempts in the literature to predict outcomes based

on abstract ethicalframeworks and the influences of moral perception.

Initially, frameworks and constructsrooted in individuals’ethical philos-

ophies and value orientations were introduced in empirical research

(Ford & Richardson,1994; Loe, Ferrell, & Mansfield, 2000). Later, sub-

jectivity of individual ethics was addressed broadly through constructs

such as moral awareness, moral intensity, ethical sensitivity, ethical val-

ues, and cultural differences (Craft, 2013; Ho, 2010). However, these

moral conceptsentail disembodied ideas andappraisals, not the evalua-

tive perceptions of whole persons, whether of the self or others

(Albert, Reynolds, & Turan, 2015). Interpersonal perceptions are not

equivalent to evaluations of discrete events because perceptions of

people are gestate, and through interpersonal relations are also inter-

subjective (K€

upers, 2015). Moreover, ethically related personality and

character traits (e.g., narcissism, humility, etc.) are deontological in

nature and are more likely to trigger emotional responses than conse-

quentialist moralreasoning (Greene, Nystrom, Engell, Darley, & Cohen,

2004; Haidt,2001).

The science of how latent individual characteristics become appa-

rent to observers originates from a field that is not native to conven-

tional business ethics. The field of assessment and selection supporting

HRM decisions isentirely built on a mandate to predict criterion(work-

related) outcomes using rigorously designed predictor measures (Bin-

ning & Barrett, 1989). Behavioral ethics research typically makes the

crude assumption that widely varying types of ethical (or unethical)

behaviors can be lumped together, whether it is insider stock trading,

deception by medical residents, mentally retarded client abuse, to

name a few (Kish-Gephart, Harrison, & Trevi~

no, 2010). But the meth-

odologies of individual assessment and selection require empirically

validated inferences concerningthe association between predictor vari-

ables (e.g., integrity testing, structured interview), criterion variables

(e.g., counterproductive work behavior, CWB), and utility indicators

(e.g., reduced losses from theft). Accordingly, conceptsand methods of

assessment used widely in the HRM literature are drawn on through-

out this article. Whether the context is standardized selection methods

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CHIU AND HACKETT