The impact of moral attentiveness on manager’s turnover intent
ISSN: 1746-5680
Article publication date: 10 August 2020
Issue publication date: 20 October 2020
Abstract
Purpose
With the rise in public awareness of corporate social responsibility, business leaders are increasingly expected to recognize the needs and demands of multiple stakeholders. There may, however, be unintended consequences of this expectation for organizational managers who engage these needs and demands with a high level of moral attentiveness. This study aims to investigate the indirect effect of managerial moral attentiveness on managerial turnover intent, serially mediated by moral dissonance and moral stress.
Design/methodology/approach
Multi-phase survey data were collected from 130 managers within a large sales organization regarding experiences of moral dissonance and moral stress. The authors analyzed the relation of these experiences to measures of moral attentiveness and turnover intent using structural equation modeling.
Findings
Results support a serial mediation model, with a positive, indirect effect between moral attentiveness and turnover intent among managers through moral dissonance and moral stress. Overall, the results suggest that expecting business leaders to be morally attentive may result in greater moral dissonance and moral stress, potentially impacting their intentions to stay with the organization.
Practical implications
Implementing positive practices toward processing moral dissonance and reducing moral stress may be a mechanism toward retaining ethically inclined organizational leaders.
Originality/value
This study is the first to identify moral attentiveness as an antecedent to turnover intent within managers. It also establishes the serial mechanisms of moral dissonance and moral stress and provides suggestions on how to retain morally attentive managers by actively managing those mechanisms.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Compliance with Ethical Standards.
Funding: No funding was received for this study.
Conflict of Interest: Author A, B, C and D declare they have no conflict of interest.
Ethical Approval: All procedures performed in study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments of comparable ethical standards.
Informed Consent: Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
Citation
Ames, J., Bluhm, D., Gaskin, J. and Lyytinen, K. (2020), "The impact of moral attentiveness on manager’s turnover intent", Society and Business Review, Vol. 15 No. 3, pp. 189-209. https://doi.org/10.1108/SBR-03-2020-0025
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited