From Intrapsychic Moral Awareness to the Role of Social Disruptions,Labeling,and Actions in the Emergence of Moral Issues

Moral awareness

The process leading up to moral behavior is said to begin with moral awareness, or “a person’s recognition that his or her potential decision or action could affect the interests, welfare, or expectations of the self or others in a fashion that may conflict with one or more ethical standards” (Butterfield et al., 2000, p. 982; Jones, 1991; Rest, 1986). This casts moral awareness as a special kind of encoding process in which the individual decision maker pays attention to incoming information and categorizes it as a moral issue. This definition has been further refined as “a person’s determination that a situation contains moral content and legitimately can be considered from a moral point of view” (Reynolds, 2006b, p. 233).

Jones and Ryan (1997) argue that “Recognition of a moral issue must take place before the moral agent can consciously engage his/her moral decision making capacity. Otherwise, he/she will make a judgment on grounds other than moral ones” (Jones & Ryan, 1997, p. 665).

Moral awareness focuses on a whether an individual is aware of moral content in a particular case, while the related but distinct concept of moral attentiveness places in the foreground an individual’s propensity to see moral content across cases (Reynolds, 2008). Building on social cognitive theory, Reynolds argues that moral attentiveness is a general feature of individual interpretation that can predict recall of morally related behaviors and, ultimately, moral behavior. He separates morality from other types of concepts by arguing “that the concepts associated with morals and morality, constitute a distinct cognitive category or framework that can serve as a source of chronic accessibility” (Reynolds, 2008, p. 1028).

Moral scripts

In addition to encoding “moral” content, the moral script approach argues that a script is “a specialized type of schema that retains knowledge of actions appropriate for specific situations and contexts” (Gioia, 1992, p. 387; Gioia & Poole, 1984). Ethical behavior is caused in part by individuals who possess and utilize scripts that have moral content, or who can break and revise the automaticity of an amoral schema by problematizing cues (Abelson, 1981). Unethical behavior is caused in part by “scripts that typically include no ethical component in their cognitive content” (Gioia, 1992, p. 388).

The script approach has been updated by recent neurocognitive models of moral decision making, which argue that ethical prototypes allow individuals to recognize and process moral information (Reynolds, 2006a). Reynolds posits that, “Ethical prototypes include normative evaluations and prescriptive recommendations that help the individual adapt to or cope with the ethical situation. Indeed, it is these additional dimensions that make ethical decisions unique from other kinds of decisions” (Reynolds, 2006a, p. 739).

Moral frames

Related to moral awareness, but firmly grounded in behavioral research rather than in Rest’s and Kohlberg’s work, the moral frames approach argues that frames are the dominant characteristics of the situational construal as perceived by the decision maker (Bazerman, 1994). Amoral frames are characterized by a lack of ethical and moral considerations in the construal of the decision maker, and can be further specified by the concepts they do include (e.g., legal frame, business frame). The idea of a moral frame foregrounds how an individual interprets a situation and whether they are morally aware (Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008). A decision frame refers to “the type of decision that individuals believe they are making—how it is that they have coded or categorized the decision” (Tenbrunsel & Messick, 2004). If a decision is coded as an ethical one, ethical considerations will be part of the decision-making process. Conversely, if the decision is coded as a business decision or a legal decision, other considerations, such as profit or compliance, might be more central to the decision-making process (Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008, p. 561). In the moral frames approach, when individuals are morally aware they can be intentional about their decisions, but there is no guarantee that the outcomes of their decisions will be interpreted as being ethical by others. Therefore, a moral frame is used primarily to constitute ethical decision making as a distinct cognitive process. The moral frame idea has been used by a variety of researchers (Awasthi, 2008; Boyle, Dahlstrom, & Kellaris, 1998; Elm & Weber, 1994; Greenwood & Hinings, 1996; Moore, 2008; Soule, 2002; Treviño, 1992). Most recently, Sonenshein (2009) illustrated how strategic issues become moral issues when employees adopt an “employee welfare” frame that highlights the impact on employees in terms of rights and consequences as opposed to a managerial strategic frame.

Limitations

The intrapsychic views about morality have been useful in moving beyond rationalist conceptions of ethics, where the moral issue or content is assumed to be external to the individual and easy to perceive, and where unethical behavior is attributed to flaws in reasoning (Hunt & Vitell, 1986; Jones, 1991; Treviño & Youngblood, 1990). Intrapsychic views have been better able to describe and explain individual variation in cognition (Bruner, 1973), and what seemed to be “irrational” departures from utility maximization (Messick & Kramer, 1996). Given these benefits of intrapsychic views, understanding how a particular individual construes a situation or issue is absolutely necessary for the study of morality, but it is not sufficient. Strict adherence to the intrapsychic assumption also has several limitations that can constrain theorizing about ethics.

In this section, I illustrate two limitations of the intrapsychic views, which claim that individual cognition using moral concepts distinguishes moral decision-making processes from amoral ones. These approaches: (1) minimize the role of action in explaining how morality emerges, and (2) are difficult to operationalize because language is not easily separated into moral or amoral buckets.

Where’s the action?

Most of the work in ethical decision making has focused on moral awareness because it is theorized to be the first stage in a multistage process that ends in moral judgment or moral action (Kohlberg, 1981; Rest, 1986). Many models simply stop at moral judgment, assuming that the action that follows will be consistent with that judgment (Haidt, 2001; Sonenshein, 2007; Treviño, 1986). Those studies that do examine moral action examine its relationship with moral awareness and moral judgment (Blasi, 1980; Kohlberg, 1969; Treviño & Youngblood, 1990). These approaches foreground individual cognition and background social interaction although there is acknowledgment that social interaction is connected to the kinds of frames people use (Fiske & Taylor, 1991; Weick, 1995). Additionally, while the entire area of ethical decision making can be read as overly individualistic, there is a budding area of research on moral emotions and affect that examines social emotions and their role in the EDM process (Baumeister, Vohs, DeWall, & Zhang, 2007; Greene, 2011; Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993; Monin, Pizarro, & Beer, 2007; Reynolds, 2006a; Tenbrunsel & Messick, 2004; Warren & Smith-Crowe, 2008).

This focus on cognition has minimized the role of action in the emergence of morality (Gentile, 2010; Jones & Ryan, 1997) since researchers have largely assumed that subjective perception of moral content causes moral issues to emerge. My intention is not to examine the interrelationships between action and other stages of Rest’s model. ⁴ Instead, I intend simply to specify the role of action in the emergence of moral issues—a relationship that has largely been left out of the literature. Specifically, the nature of the action—how it is implemented, or the habits, behaviors, routines, and words enacted which are then interpreted by others—is rendered less prominent in the story of how moral issues emerge.

Actions and how they are differentially interpreted are a source for morality and an important fuel for sensemaking about ethics. This focus on implementation and process is mirrored in the organizational justice literature, in the finding that procedural justice can minimize the negative impacts of low outcome favorability (Brockner, 2002; Brockner & Wiesenfeld, 1996). The process by which a company or individual enacts an intention shapes the sensemaking of others and is downplayed in intrapsychic views of morality. The way in which individuals and organizations act creates further cues from which others make sense of their actions.

Operationalization

These intrapsychic approaches to morality—moral awareness, moral scripts, and moral frames—start from the premise that what separates a moral decision process from an amoral one is determined by features of individual cognition that categorize situations, cues, and events as moral or not. If the individual is not morally aware or does not apply a moral frame, script, or mental model, then that individual is not engaging in a moral or ethical decision-making process. Thus, in these views, moral issues emerge when individuals construe moral content in their situations. It is important to note that not all studies have examined moral awareness as a binary variable. Butterfield et al. (2000) examine the extent of an individual decision maker’s moral awareness. They utilize a frequency count of explicit moral terms to measure the extent of an individual’s moral awareness.

In each of these approaches, there is little specification of what “moral” means and how to distinguish explicitly moral concepts from other types of concept. These definitions are open to a wide variety of interpretations, and researchers—like most people—differ both on how they draw the line between the moral and amoral realms, and whether they choose to draw one at all. Researchers also differ on which communities, principles, and ethical standards they refer to when assessing whether something is acceptable.

These debates over the definition of morality demonstrate a critical feature of terms such as “moral” and “ethical.” Individuals apply them in ways that fit their past experiences and make sense to them and the communities in which they live (Walzer, 2006; Wittgenstein, 1953). Because people have different experiences and projects, these terms have considerable plasticity:

Categories have plasticity because they are socially defined, because they have to be adapted to local circumstances, and because they have radial structure. By radial structure we mean that there are a few central instances of the category that have all the features associated with the category, but mostly the category contains peripheral instances that have only a few of these features. (Weick et al., 2005, p. 411)

For some scholars, “ethical” means adherence to universal principles of a God (Aquinas, 1964; Conroy & Emerson, 2004), natural science (Greene, 2003), or reason (Kant, 2002; Kohlberg, 1981). To others, it means maximizing benefits and reducing harms (Mill, 1861). For others still, it means living a virtuous life (Aristotle, 1962; Hartman, 1996), or some combination of these approaches. Prominent scholars have noted that it is easier to achieve consensus on what is immoral or unethical than on what is right or good (Donaldson & Dunfee, 1994; Walzer, 2006). Therefore, it is not surprising that a majority of work under the umbrella of ethical decision making has focused on high consensus deviations from clear social norms, like corruption (Ashforth & Anand, 2003; Greve et al., 2010), conflicts of interest (Moore & Loewenstein, 2004), and fraud (Harris & Bromiley, 2007). These central cases are more easily communicated and agreed upon by researchers to be “within the realm of right and wrong.” However, many organizational ethical failures do not start off as clear violations, and organizational actors can experience ambiguity about the “right” way to act in a particular situation (Jackall, 1988, Vaughn, 1996). Organizational actors use terms like “ethical” and “moral” differently because they connect these terms to different experiences, meanings, and ideas. Thus by looking beyond explicit moral terms scholars can better understand how moral issues emerge.

Jones (1991) suggests that criteria such as the recognition of consequences to others and the presence of some clear choice should be used to distinguish morality from amorality. Similarly, Rest posits that “minimally, a person realizes that she/he could do something that would affect the interests, welfare, or expectations of other people” (Rest, 1986, p. 5).

Despite broad definitions offered by Jones (1991) and Rest (1986), the operationalization of morality in most empirical research has been focused on the use of explicit moral terms such as “rights,” “harms,” “principles,” “justice,” or on simply asking participants if they perceive any moral content (Blodgett, Lu, Rose, & Vitell, 2001; Cherry, Lee, & Chien, 2003; Fleischman & Valentine, 2003; Singhapakdi, Marta, Rallapalli, & Rao, 2000). Researchers in behavioral ethics have relied on various methods such as coding participant answers to vignettes, analyzing writing samples, (Higgins, King, & Mavin, 1982), asking participants to evaluate morality in others (Bargh & Thein, 1985), and requesting the recall and reporting of specific moral or immoral behaviors (Ford & Richardson, 1994; Loe et al., 2000; O’Fallon & Butterfield, 2005; Reynolds, 2008). These studies are focused on explicit moral terms when they propose that moral awareness will be influenced by whether or not the issue is framed in moral terms versus morally neutral or non-moral terms (Baucus & Rechner, 1995; Bird & Waters, 1989; Butterfield et al., 2000).

It is not clear how researchers understand what counts as an ethical frame or as moral awareness (Bebeau & Brabeck, 1987; Butterfield et al., 2000; Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Shaub, Finn, & Munter, 1993; Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008). In some cases, researchers can ask individuals if they are morally aware, but this introduces post-hoc rationalization and bias into the construals of participants (Sonenshein, 2007). Many participants would want to show themselves in a positive light and would say, when asked by a researcher, that they perceive the moral issue (Goffman, 1959).

Theorists in the moral frame approach categorize a decision as moral in process if the decision maker codes it as such. However, different decision makers and researchers will use different criteria to assess whether their decision is a moral one. For example, if a manager in an organization is faced with a complex decision and a main feature of her construal of the decision is profit, then under the moral frame approach, researchers would categorize her decision as a business decision, not a moral one. Researchers could subsequently ask the manager or observe her actions and speech and realize that she is concerned with profit because she believes she has a moral obligation to her employees and shareholders. The use of terms not consistent with morality could mask whether a decision maker in fact considers morality (Bird & Waters, 1989).

The issue is that the use of terms such as “profit,” “law,” or “compliance” themselves do not tell us enough about the decision maker’s construal to know if he or she is morally aware or not, because the meaning of the terms is flexible. An individual could be enacting a seemingly “business” decision for moral reasons (Jordan, 2007; Waters & Bird, 1989). The law can, and many times is, tightly associated with moral norms. These terms could have, and many times do have, deeply moral roots for those who use them. For many managers, maximizing profit is not a way to shirk responsibility (Friedman, 1962); instead, such managers construe themselves as being responsible by following the professional norms that they believe managers should follow, although many business ethicists have argued that these are short-sighted strategies (Freeman, 1984; Freeman, Wicks, & Parmar, 2004, Solomon, 2004). This is not a case of managers using amoral frames or shirking responsibility, but a case of differing conceptions of responsibility and ethics. Specifically, managers differ in what they think responsibility means—is managerial responsibility only to their shareholders or to shareholders and other stakeholders? What at face value seems like a pure business decision can have moral content below the surface that is lost if researchers focus only on the use of explicit moral language.

In research, to categorize participant speech or writing, a researcher must have a conception of which words and terms are moral and which are not. Therefore, how moral awareness gets operationalized in any one specific study is a function of how the researchers and data coders interpret ethics. It is easier to focus on the central cases than on the peripheral ones. However, many ethics issues arise from peripheral cases where definitions and meanings are not shared.

To correct these liabilities, I construct a sensemaking model of how moral issues emerge, which foregrounds disruptions, labeling, and actions to demonstrate that morality is not just within the brain of an individual decision maker, but also lives in the relationships that exist between people.

Disruptions

People possess expectations and schemas that can be disrupted. “Discrepant events, or surprises, trigger a need for explanation, or post-diction, and, correspondingly, for a process through which interpretations of the discrepancies are developed” (Weick, 1995, p. 4). Disruptions arise in two broad ways: first, the occurrence of a new event that is not expected and does not fit into the current ongoing interpretation of the situation; and second, the expected event that does not happen (Mandler, 1984, p. 188). Disruptions are caused in part by the verbal and physical behavior of others, and activities are disrupting because people interpret them differently. People interpret them differently because they have different knowledge available about themselves and others (Jones & Harris, 1967), different priorities and projects (Darley & Batson, 1973), and different experiences (Schacter, 1996) that shape our sensemaking. This phase is social in the sense that the expectations that are disrupted come from social interaction with others and shared language. Actors make sense of their own actions and those of others, using labels that they have acquired and developed by interacting with others.

For a concrete example, consider a financial analyst at a large credit card company who is assigned to evaluate the profitability of a new credit card product. The new credit card is unique in that it has transparent terms and no hidden tricks or traps for customers (Bar-Gill & Warren, 2008). The analyst uses the discounted cash flow method to better understand the potential revenues and costs associated with the proposed product, and how they compare with the current less-transparent credit cards the company offers. When he presents his analysis to his supervisor in an interdepartmental meeting, the analyst and the supervisor get into a heated discussion about one key assumption. In his models, the analyst has assumed that the adoption rate of new customers would be higher than previous growth rates for past cards. The supervisor disagrees with this assumption and would prefer that the analyst use historical company data to serve as a proxy for the growth rate.

Adjusting the assumption to reflect past data would make the project less financially attractive and increase the likelihood that the development office would not pursue it. This may seem like a purely financial decision. If researchers were to query the analyst, they would find that he construes the issues as about the quality and accuracy of his assumptions—he sees himself as a professional and experienced analyst and wants to do his best. The verbal disagreement with his supervisor disrupts his expectations not only about the growth rate, but about his own identity as a qualified analyst as well.

In contrast, the supervisor is concerned with presenting a conservative analysis to her boss because she has incentives not to green-light many new products, to conserve cash in a down market, and to be a prudent steward of shareholder value. Her expectations about her leadership of the team were disrupted in the meeting when she did not expect the young analyst to push back on her request so forcefully in a public setting (Jackall, 1988).

According to the current models of moral awareness and moral framing, this example would not qualify as a moral decision or moral issue because neither the supervisor nor the analyst seems to be morally aware—specifically, neither appears to be using explicit moral concepts in their construals. There does seem to be some general awareness that the actions—deciding which assumption to use and launching the new card—may affect others, including customers, shareholders, and other departments within the company. Even in decisions that seem to be only financial, there is a link to traditional ethics concepts such as appropriate norms and rules (Kant, 1785) (we have always used historical data for forecasting), consequences (Mill, 1861) (if we use a more conservative assumption, we will not be able to convince the development team to go forward with this project), and character (Aristotle, 1962) (I am a skilled and qualified analyst, which, in this context, means making accurate assumptions). ⁵ Therefore, these construals meet the broader criteria for moral awareness, but do not employ explicit moral concepts and would not fall under the umbrella of research in moral decision making (Waters & Bird, 1989). But yet the seeds of a moral issue have been planted.

Additionally, both the analyst and his boss have what they each consider to be good reasons for their positions. The boss believes it is important to use a historical growth rate because that assumption has worked in the past, whereas the analyst believes that there are features of the new product that require revising the old assumptions. It is not clear who is right, and there is ambiguity about what to do in the analysis going forward. Consequently, this would qualify as a right vs. right case (Kidder, 1995), or a case of conflicting moral norms—or “beliefs about how one should or should not behave” (Krebs & Janicki, 2004, p. 127).

Labeling

In response to a disruption of expectations, actors notice and bracket cues to construct meaning. Constructing meaning is a mix of intuitive and controlled cognitive processes (Reynolds, 2006a; Sonenshein, 2007; Weick, 1995). “Phenomena have to be forcibly carved out of the undifferentiated flux of raw experience and conceptually fixed and labeled so that they can become common currency for communicational exchanges” (Chia, 2000, p. 517). Labeling is not a reflection of reality, but constructs reality (Davidson, 1991; Phillips & Hardy, 2002). The spirit in which I use the term is consistent with the pragmatist idea that “elements of what we call ‘language’ or ‘mind’ penetrate so deeply into what we call ‘reality’ that the very project of representing ourselves as being mappers of something ‘language-independent’ is fatally compromised from the start” (Putnam, 1990, p. 28). Labeling is similar to moral frames and moral awareness in that it is a coding and categorization process that makes situations more intelligible and informs action. It is distinct from moral awareness in that it foregrounds the way in which organizational actors create and shape moral issues through language rather than recognizing objective moral content. This is important because how one constructs the issue can differ and can have different effects on opportunities for joint action. Iris Murdoch argues that private cognitions are impossible to verify, therefore public and social assertions like language are key tools that individuals use to alter their environment and make sense of others (Murdoch, 2001). I use the term labeling instead of frames to underscore this action and social verification, and also to further step away from relying on private cognitions to distinguish between moral and amoral decisions.

Once an issue is labeled it makes more sense, because the current situation is tied to meanings acquired in the past. These mental models may help actors recognize and form a response to a problem. Individuals are capable of thinking about morality when they are by themselves, and they do so on the basis of their previous social interactions (Piaget, 1955). Sensemaking is about labeling and categorizing to stabilize the stream of experience. If actors do not label phenomena similarly, it is more difficult for them to successfully coordinate their actions. “The ways in which events are first envisioned immediately begins the work of organizing because events are bracketed and labeled in ways that predispose people to find common ground” (Weick et al., 2005). Intrapsychic approaches to distinguishing moral decision-making processes from amoral ones would use the nature of the frame or label to distinguish the nature of the process. I extend this line of research by going deeper into the details of how interacting individuals construe and categorize their situations and how these similarities and differences create opportunities and challenges for coordination, which could then result in using moral labels.

In our example, the analyst wonders why his boss seemed so upset about the adoption rate and why she was dismissive of his justifications for using it. He comes to label the episode as a political struggle, tying the events of the meeting with his previous knowledge that his boss wants to move up in the organization and does not want to be seen as impractical by her colleagues. According to the analyst, he inadvertently stepped into a political landmine—he talks about the issue this way to his colleagues. He feels unappreciated for his efforts to help the organization succeed. Certain trigger points like broken promises or public arguments, which are embedded in different interpretations, may lead the stakeholders involved to use stronger labels (Sonenshein, 2007).

The supervisor interprets the presentation in a different light. She ties the events to other past incidents where the analyst had not been as quick to respond to her requests, or had seemed to be difficult for no apparent reason. She comes to label the issue as an authority issue—specifically, that the analyst has a problem deferring to her authority (Jackall, 1988). Her sensemaking becomes filled with explicit moral terms, as she thinks about the harms that can accrue in an organization and a career when subordinates disobey a knowledgeable and legitimate authority. She sees obedience as a virtue and the lack of obedience as a vice. If researchers were to listen to her talk about authority, they would categorize her talk as morally aware in the explicit sense. Her use of terms closely connected with ethics arises out of her disrupted expectation about the analyst’s behavior, which in turn was created by the difference in interpreting the situation.

The meeting was interpreted differently by the analyst and the supervisor because each took similar cues and embellished them with other cues from their experience and memory to retrospectively construct a plausible narrative for the meeting. The financial analyst is not aware that he is making a moral decision, but he is concerned about the effect of his actions on the profitability of the firm and its ability to make money for shareholders. His boss is confused by the analyst’s public refusal to use the historical growth rate and begins to use a number of explicit moral terms to describe her situation. Given the differences in their construals, the analyst and the manager will have trouble finding common ground and coordinating a successful completion of the analysis. Both the analyst and the supervisor miss another moral issue: the ways in which the financial product can benefit customers and potentially create value for the company. While the supervisor uses explicit moral concepts to describe the authority issue, she is blind to the ways in which customers may interpret the transparent credit card—as a trustworthy and reliable service. Failure to launch the credit card with simple terms in turn leads to customer backlash, when the media slips the story. Customers interpret the company’s actions as another example of how the big credit card companies are not in business to help them, but to take as much money from them as possible.

To understand the moral nature of this unfolding situation, researchers need to move beyond general moral awareness and understand how individuals construe a situation and how that construal, because of its similarities and differences to other construals, creates or threatens opportunities for joint action. In our example, the way the supervisor construes the issue jeopardizes coordination with the subordinate and with customers, but could increase coordination with her boss, perhaps even prompting moral praise from him. They way both the analyst and supervisor are thinking of the issue is so distant from their customers’ perspectives that their actions are sure to cause disruptions and trigger the use of moral labels.

By being more specific about what meaning is shared and how the actions that are connected to those meanings create disruptions for others, scholars can better understand how and why moral issues arise. Different moral issues emerge as the nature of which meanings are shared with who changes. Moral issues can arise even when some or all of the parties are not morally aware. The same set of actions can cause multiple moral issues to arise for different stakeholders. For example, the moral issue that customers see (that credit card companies are taking advantage of them) is different than the moral issue that the boss sees (that subordinates should be supportive of their supervisors).

The example above also illustrates that there are a variety of labels people can use to bracket their experiences: political, legal, authority, and moral, to name just a few. Of course, taken this way, the labeling of an issue or action as moral is different for different people. Moral labels can be used to praise as well as condemn. Actors use these terms differently and, thus, their use is triggered by different cues. Even when a person is not morally aware, as in the case of our financial analyst, his actions can still be interpreted by others as having to do with morality in terms of consequences, norms, and character. The use of explicit moral concepts on the part of the supervisor emerges from her interactions with the analyst and the different interpretations that constitute their behavior.

The use of explicit moral concepts is also connected to the use of other labels. Both the analyst and the supervisor want the analysis to be “accurate,” but they have different meanings of accuracy. Is accuracy in this case achieved by benchmarking historical data or adjusting the numbers for novel circumstances? While both want the analysis to be “successful,” they differ on what “success” means in this context: short-term or long-term profitability? Would success mean the pursuit or cancellation of the project? Ambiguity about these other related terms contributes to the differences in how the analyst and his supervisor construe the situation, which in turn contributes to differential assessments about the project’s acceptability. To truncate the study of morality to only those terms which have a blatant moral connotation would be to miss the ways in which other acts of labeling and differences in labeling shape action and its subsequent interpretation. To understand how ethics issues emerge from a sensemaking perspective, researchers must better understand the legitimate differences that exist in how to describe something, and how those differences make a difference to action. Therefore, events may not be moral (as opposed to amoral) in and of themselves, but may come to be called moral or amoral in their aftermath as individuals use different criteria to continually make sense of unfolding events. Things become and are made moral and amoral by our use of those terms to bracket and distinguish features of our experience.

If every situation has the potential to become morally salient in interaction, what can the field of ethics continue to offer scholars and practitioners? In this model, the focus is not on the binary categorization of “moral” or “amoral” but on the nature or quality of the ethics. Both the analyst and his supervisor have cognitions that can be categorized as moral rather than amoral, but the interesting issues arise when you compare and contrast their differing interpretations of morality. By taking an interpsychic view researchers need to move past a binary view of ethics and instead engage the specific construals and their effects on character, consequences, and principles. By undertaking this kind of analysis, ethicists and managers can anticipate where moral issues may arise and intervene to reduce the likelihood of disruptions.

Action

Current research in moral decision making and sensemaking about ethics has focused predominantly on cognition and judgment, with the assumption that the resulting behavior will be consistent with that moral judgment (Gentile, 2010; Jones & Ryan, 1997; Kohlberg & Candee, 1984; Krebs & Denton, 2005). Many models stop at moral judgment (Haidt, 2001; Reynolds, 2006a; Sonenshein, 2007).

In our example, given the analyst’s construction of the events of the meeting as a political power play, he begins to withdraw further from his supervisor, not wanting to get caught up in another political landmine. The signals he sends feed the supervisor’s sense that the analyst is unnecessarily defiant. Given the moral nature of the supervisor’s construals, she comes to the conclusion that the analyst’s defiance is a risk she cannot accept, and files to transfer him to another department. She sees her decision as a moral decision—she believes she is doing the right thing by moving him to a department where he can flourish and she can protect her career from any potential risks that he could initiate. Because she feels more comfortable communicating in writing, she sends him an email to inform him of the change, which he did not expect, triggering more sensemaking for the analyst. He now comes to label his current situation, and particularly his former supervisor’s actions, as immoral.

These actions were born out of both intuitive and controlled ways of making sense, and fulfilled by habits, skills, and embodied ways of acting. Labels have consequences in that they shape action, which then must be made sense of by the actor and by others who are aware of the action. Action creates new opportunities for making sense. The analyst, after leaving the credit card department and working in the claims department, came to see the transparent credit card project as a moral issue for customers and retrospectively assigned this label to his past actions.

Additionally, this view demonstrates how the nature of an action (for example, the boss sending an email about the transfer instead of talking face-to-face) affects how people interpret the morality of an action. Had the supervisor enacted a different set of behaviors, and exhibited more interpersonally sensitive actions (Molinsky & Margolis, 2005), she might not have triggered the use of “immoral” as a label from the analyst. Beyond moral awareness or moral intent, how an action is implemented, even with the best of intentions, can shape the triggering of moral labeling in others; therefore the nature of the action is integral to how moral issues emerge in organizations.

From Sensemaking to Reliability

The sensemaking model explained above shifts attention from the emergence of moral issues as the subjective perception of objective moral issues to the intersubjective emergence of moral issues through the disruptions that actions create for the self and for others, and how those disruptions are subsequently made sense of. If researchers truncate the study of morality to only the use of explicit moral terms, then they miss the social interactions, relationships, and shared sensemaking of which one outcome is the use of explicit moral terms.

Ethics unfolds over time. The knowledge and sense of this unfolding is not located just inside the head of one manager or subordinate. “Instead, the locus is system wide, and is realized in stronger or weaker coordination and information distribution among interdependent actors” (Weick et al., 2009, p. 89). The relative strength of these coordinated activities may lead the constituent parties to use moral labels, both positive and negative.

In this view, the focus shifts from whether an individual is morally aware or not, or if they are applying a moral frame, to how their specific construction of a situation compares with others, as well as under what circumstances those differences and similarities are then bracketed and labeled as moral (Figure 1). This requires individuals to be aware of and actively manage changing conditions, of which one major element is the construals of others (Bigley & Roberts, 2001; Rochlin, 1993; Weick et al., 2008). By highlighting the intersubjective dimension of how moral issues emerge, the emergence of moral issues can be recast as reliability, or the capacity to continuously and effectively manage those changing social conditions.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The Effects of Increasing Commonality between Construals.

Weick and Roberts (1993) conceptualize this type of action as heedful, which requires “noticing, taking care, attending, applying one’s mind, concentrating, putting one’s heart into something, thinking what one is doing, alertness, interest, intentness, studying, and trying.” When heed is spread across more activities and more connections, there should be more understanding and fewer errors (Weick & Roberts, 1993, p. 361). Shared meaning and heedful interrelating does not mean that actors have to agree on how they interpret all actions, but that they at least engage in a process where those differences are understood and rendered less disruptive. Using the reliability perspective as one lens from which to examine moral issues allows scholars to study how individuals make meaning and act to preserve particular social expectations and disrupt others. The moral acceptability of reliable relationship is dependent on the perspective it is examined from. Therefore the same action can cause disruptions for one specific group and not for another, depending on how each of these groups construes the situation. For example, fraud from within a company that condones fraud is not seen as morally unacceptable, whereas from the perspective of external stakeholders it is. A reliability perspective allows us to further unpack how these different actors construe the situation and behave in it which leads to their acceptance or rejection of specific practices.

In contrast,

When interrelating breaks down, individuals represent others in the system in less detail, contributions are shaped less by anticipated responses, and the boundaries of the envisaged system are drawn more narrowly, with the result that subordination becomes meaningless. Attention is focused on the local situation rather than the joint situation. People can’t be careful unless they take account of others and unless others do the same. Being careful is a social rather than a solitary act. To act with care, people have to envision their contributions in the context of requirements for joint action. Furthermore to act with care does not mean that one plans how to do this and then applies the plan to the action. Care is not cultivated apart from action. It is expressed in action and through action. Thus people can’t be careful, they are careful or careless. The care is in the action. (Weick & Roberts, 1993, p. 373)

This description of care and action is relevant not only to coordinating high physical risk activities on an aircraft carrier, but also to actions that carry social risk. To reduce the likelihood of negative disruptions, actors who are able to anticipate how others will interpret their behavior and then act in ways that minimize those disruptions will be more likely to be labeled moral or ethical by those others who interpret the situation similarly to them, and less likely to be labeled immoral or unethical. Returning to our example, if the analyst and the supervisor were more aware of the way in which they each interpreted the other’s actions, they could attempt to change their actions so that the other might interpret them differently and be less likely to label them as morally unacceptable. Thinking about ethics as reliability broadens the focus of scholarship beyond an individual construal to how that construal shapes action and is interpreted in a particular relational environment; thus ethics moves from a study of abstract principles to the study of specific actions and the meaning making which precedes and follows it in a social environment.

In addition to situating a particular construal in a particular relational context, thinking about ethics as reliability guides inquiry in the direction of communication and language. There are a variety of ways in which communication is integral to ethics; I will highlight three. First, communication enables expectations to be set and standards to be constructed. People communicate the relevant rules and standards in their communities to each other (Ashforth & Anand, 2003). The subtle nature of this process may impact what standards are reconstructed and enacted in particular interactions. By altering expectations, actors can make their own actions and the actions of others more or less acceptable to particular individuals, by using language to alter the meaning of those actions. Second, communication is essential to constructing the nature of actions and situations that are the feedstock for sensemaking about ethics. Describing and articulating events and situations (Weick et al., 2005) allows interpretations of what is going on to be shared and disseminated. Making sense of actions and situations together is what ethics is about. What just happened? What are the effects? Are they acceptable? These things are communicatively constructed, and by looking at ethics as reliability, scholars can better examine this process of how communication shapes morality, rather than how individuals perceive an objective moral reality or how they subjectively construe ethics apart from social context. Finally, communication allows scholars to examine how conversations about ethics change over time. Are there particular standards that are no longer used? Where are the social lines where particular justifications are more or less acceptable? How do individuals adapt their use of particular moral justifications? These changes are manifest in the pattern and structure of communication (Cooren, 2000).

These insights raise new possibilities for research in ethics and allow researchers to be more precise in their description of moral issues. For example, a common critique of the consensus view of ethics—that ethics is about local shared beliefs, values, and principles, not objective and transcendent ones—is that groups are no more moral than individuals. According to critics, evil things can be done by and perpetuated within groups; therefore, actors need something more than consensus as a foundation to get to the morally right answer.

The view offered here is useful for addressing these closed moral communities (Greil & Rudy, 1984) because it articulates the idea that morality is not just a feature of individual cognition, but has relational dimensions. Therefore, it allows a redescription of the problem where the moral issue does not reside solely within the deviant group, but outside it as well, because outside observers can and do make sense of the group’s actions and come to label them as immoral. Ethics failures are not just failures of “individuals, but represent the breakdown of social processes and comprehension that can be traced to flawed inter-relating” (Weick & Roberts, 1993, p. 378). This view eschews the need for objective normative standards as a way to judge the behavior of a group and, instead, redefines the boundaries of the group to bring in different and relevant local moral standards that must be negotiated. Reconceptualizing the issue this way suggests different strategies for action. If the problem lies within a particular person or a group, it would make sense to try to “fix” them in some way. If the issue emerges out of the differential ways in which individuals and groups interpret their situation, then a broader set of solutions is available. For example, how can we relate differently to make each other more aware of the effects of our actions? Instead of finding a single normative yardstick to judge immoral individuals and groups, attending to the intersubjective dimension highlights the relationship and breakdown of different normative principles. Instead of trying to make either group more aware of generic morality, focusing on the real differences in construal groups can open the door to the hard negotiations required to come to some consensus. Sustainable and morally acceptable behavior, then, is not just about local consensus, but about broadening the circle of consensus to include at least the people who are affected (Freeman, 1984; Rorty, 1979). By taking a sensemaking approach, scholars must be clear about which organizational actors holds what view, and how those views impact others. This requires more specificity about how a moral issue is socially distributed.

It is not the case that taking an interpsychic view diminishes personal responsibility. After all, responsibility is a social concept: it is about who one is responsible to for what specific actions (Kelman & Hamilton, 1989). People have different interpretations about their own and others’ responsibility that must be negotiated (Milgram, 1976). Thinking about morality as a binary gets in the way of understanding the nuance of our responsibilities: what specifically is one responsible for and to whom. By unpacking the social environment more carefully, actors can better understand their personal responsibility and surface potential conflicts that may arise. Reliability is another important lens on responsibility: it helps us understand how organizational actors perceive and anticipate the ways in which others make sense of their behavior, a skill that is essential for responsible behavior.

This kind of specificity is useful for theorizing because it allows us to ask deeper questions, such as: How do outsiders problematize practices of groups in a moral cocoon (Maguire & Hardy, 2009)? And what kinds of interactions will lead actors to register and accommodate the variety of construals in their environment (Sen, 1993)? Broadening the view of ethics beyond simply subjective or objective conceptions allows researchers to attend to more complex emergent issues (Sitkin, Sutcliffe, & Schroeder, 1994). Thinking about the emergence of moral issues as embedded in social relations is consistent with a view of ethics adopted by a broad range of research in business ethics (Bowie, 1999; Donaldson & Dunfee, 1999; Freeman, 1984; Werhane, 2002).