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Coalitions are informal and interdependent groups of actors operating within organizations, yet their effects in organizations are not widely understood. In this paper, we develop a model of coalition formation and functioning inside organizations. By extrapolating the behavioral intentions (i.e., altruistic or antagonistic) and compositional differences (i.e., supplementary or complementary) among these informal group structures, we classify coalitions into four forms (i.e., lobby, cartel, circle, and alliance), theorizing how each coalition form affects work role innovation, resource allocations, and work performance. Our conceptualization helps clarify previous theoretical inconsistencies and establish an agenda for the study of coalitions at work. Furthermore, this paper provides insights into the ways that coalitions support or impede the organization’s objectives.

In this chapter, we propose that society- and organization-level social context cues influence the endorsement of ethical leadership. More specifically, we propose that certain organizational culture values provide proximal contextual cues that people use to form perceptions of the importance of ethical leadership. We further propose that specific societal culture values and societal corruption provide a set of more distal, yet salient, environmental cues about the importance of ethical leadership. Using data from Project GLOBE, we provide evidence that both proximal and distal contextual cues were related to perceptions of four dimensions of ethical leadership as important for effective leadership, including character/integrity, altruism, collective motivation, and encouragement.

In the past decade, the effectiveness and efficiency foreign aid (Aid Industry) has generated considerable debate in both of the academic and popular press. Despite spending billions of dollars in foreign aid well over a billion people remain in extreme poverty. This paper did not intend to question the magnitude of the effort or the motives of donors or aid agencies, but rather why the aid programs have not been more effective.

Certain research in behavioral economics, pathological altruism, and emotional empathy may help provide answers. Common to these theories is the idea that well-intentioned actions or policies may cause unintended, harmful consequences to either the donors or the intended beneficiaries of these actions or policies. This paradoxical result is typically due to the altruist’s inability to properly analyze the situation for a variety of reasons. The Aid Industry may be particularly susceptible to these behavioral biases and thus is likely to suffer to some extent from unintended adverse consequences.

This paper focused on ethical considerations at the microlevel, that is, the paper considered the impact of aid on individual’s economic utility and human dignity as opposed to macromeasures such as gross domestic product. Our purpose was to examine how behavioral theories can improve foreign aid efficiency and effectiveness. Using specific examples and considering ethical arguments based on utility and rights theories, we illustrated how these behavioral theories help explain the Aid Industry’s suboptimal results.

Purpose – Uses Kenneth Boulding's concept of “serial reciprocity” in conjunction with information about the evolution of emotions and social exchange processes to identify possible mechanisms that can help explain the rise of early Christianity.

Design/methodology/approach – Using the concept of serial reciprocity as a central organizing principle, a theoretical account is developed that integrates ideas from evolutionary sociology, the sociology of emotions, and exchange theory in order to extend Rodney Stark's analysis of social forces responsible for the success of early Christianity as a social movement.

Findings – Patterns of serial reciprocity may develop when evolved emotions such as gratitude, sympathy, and empathy are activated by recipients of altruism who, in turn, become motivated to repay their benefactor by transmitting a benefit to a third-party recipient. Historical evidence reviewed by Stark is consistent with the claim that serial reciprocity may have conferred benefits to victims suffering from plagues that swept the Roman Empire during the early history of Christianity. Similar processes may be operating today in regions of the world in which aid workers provide assistance to victims of natural and man-made disasters.

Originality/value – This analysis demonstrates the value of integrating conventional sociological analysis and evolutionary theory to gain new explanatory insights about social processes such as serial reciprocity that have received relatively little prior attention by sociological researchers.

This chapter aims to understand to what extent the use of cause-related marketing, can become a tool of strategic positioning and differentiation for influencing consumption decisions of a critical type of external stakeholder, that is, the customers (participants and non-participants), in the context of school sports events. Accordingly, quantitative empirical research was carried out resorting to a questionnaire. A sample of 829 pupils in mainland Portugal was gathered, covering both participants and non-participants in School Sports events associated with food products, namely, Compal Air and Nestum Rugby. The results reveal that customers’ perception of the attributes of social responsibility and of the general attributes of the brand has a positive influence on consumption decisions, especially with regard to participants in this type of event. In addition, individual motivations, determining the decision to participate or not in events, are found to influence the consumption decision.

Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

We investigated the effect of religion on generosity, interpersonal trust, and cooperation by using games developed by experimental economists (Dictator, Trust, and Public Goods). In these experiments, individuals were paired or grouped with unknown strangers to test the degree to which religion promotes prosocial behavior. We evaluated group- and individual-level effects of religion on prosocial behavior across the three games. Although playing the games in a religious setting showed no overall difference as compared to a secular setting, we did find a weak association between some individual-level dimensions of religiosity and behavior in some of the games. The weak association between religion and behavior is consistent with theory and empirical studies using similar measures – the anonymous pairing and grouping of the economic games may moderate individual-level effects of religion. Our research is a strong complement to the empirical literature because the three studies involved a large and diverse sample and used sensitive instruments that have been found to reliably measure prosocial behavior.

The Covid-19 pandemic has continued to place intense economic and social strains on global economies and families. While rising poverty and unemployment have been worsened by the crisis, small businesses are under increasing pressure to manage burgeoning uncertainties and the corresponding economic and social challenges. No doubt, the deleterious effects of the crisis has intensified pressure on small business leaders to sustain their role in delivering responsible services.

Scholars argue that in crises, like Covid-19, the values of small business leaders are placed under scrutiny. Despite laws and regulations guiding ethical leadership especially in business, there exist challenges that are complex and not easy to address, and the pandemic situation further adds to them. The implication is that small business leaders are increasingly associated with accountability problems.

Navigating this period will require strategies for addressing the weaknesses in an existing leadership capacity in the delivery of business services, and successfully implementing ethical standards. This becomes crucial since the pandemic as an added challenge can spur on unethical leadership. The highlights of some of the key elements impacting ethical leadership during crises like Covid-19. This chapter also explores how business leaders can influence responsible behavioural change among employees for them to be creative and innovative. Additionally, an attempt will be made towards assisting small business leaders in finding responsible solutions.