Facing Ethical Challenges in the Workplace: Conceptualizing and Measuring Professional Moral Courage

Scholars have shown renewed interest in the construct of courage. Recent studies have explored its theoretical underpinnings and measurement. Yet courage is generally discussed in its broad form to include physical, psychological, and moral features. To understand a more practical form of moral cour...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of business ethics Vol. 89; no. 4; pp. 565 - 579
Main Authors Sekerka, Leslie E., Bagozzi, Richard P., Charnigo, Richard
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer 01.11.2009
Springer Netherlands
Springer Nature B.V
SeriesJournal of Business Ethics
Subjects
Behavior
Business and Management
Business Ethics
Compliance
Conceptualization
Courage
Decision making
Education
Endurance
Ethical behavior
Ethics
Management
Management decisions
Measurement
Moral agency
moral decision-making
Moral judgment
Morality
Morals
Organizational learning
Philosophy
positive ethics
positive organizational scholarship
Private military industry
proactive organizational ethics
professional moral courage
Professionalism
Psychometrics
Quality of Life Research
Studies
Values
Work place
Workplaces
United States > US
proactive organizational ethics
professional moral courage
positive organizational scholarship
moral decision-making
positive ethics
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Summary:Scholars have shown renewed interest in the construct of courage. Recent studies have explored its theoretical underpinnings and measurement. Yet courage is generally discussed in its broad form to include physical, psychological, and moral features. To understand a more practical form of moral courage, research is needed to uncover how ethical challenges are effectively managed in organizational settings. We argue that professional moral courage (PMC) is a managerial competency. To describe it and derive items for scale development, we studied managers in the U.S. military and examined prior work on moral courage. Two methods were used to measure PMC producing a five dimensional scale that organized under a single second-order factor, which we termed overall PMC. The five dimensions are moral agency, multiple values, endurance of threats, going beyond compliance, and moral goals. Convergent and discriminant validity are analyzed by use of confirmatory factor analysis procedures. We conclude by presenting a framework for proactive organizational ethics, which reflects how to support PMC as a management practice.
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ISSN:0167-4544
1573-0697
DOI:10.1007/s10551-008-0017-5