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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.

Purpose – To critically examine various ethical decision making models and use them to arrive at five hypotheses to understand the methods used by small and medium enterprise (SME) owner-managers in Australia when faced with ethical issues or dilemmas.Design/methodology/approach – This analysis involves literature reviews of rational decision making process, alternative methods of decision making and various ethical decision making models including Rest’s four-component model to arrive at the five hypotheses.Findings – The five hypotheses contend that SME owner-managers tend to resolve ethical issues using methods similar to Rest’s four-component model. Some may utilise all four components while others may skip one or more components of the model. Others may engage in intuition and heuristic methods of decision making. Ethical decisions by SME managers may be influenced by factors such as organisational factors, moral exemplars and reflection. The final hypothesis contends that SME managers could consider using the Balanced Scorecard as an instrument to monitor and manage business ethical issues.Research limitations – The literature reviews are not exhaustive but provide sufficient information for the purposes of this chapter.Practical implications – The significance of this study is that the hypotheses can be used to conduct interviews with SME managers and findings from the interviews could be developed into a practical tool for practising managers and a standard or guidelines for managing ethical issues in an SME.Originality/value – This chapter fulfils the need to understand the ethical decision making process and methods used by practicing SME managers in Australia.

This paper presents the results of a qualitative study of ethical decision making by managers employed in two major companies in the U.K. Forty managers from these large commercial organizations were interviewed about how ethical issues arise and are dealt with at work. This interview data was transcribed and a thematic content analysis was conducted in order to explore the various influences upon managerial ethical decision making. The analysis framework includes analysis at both an individual level, in terms of the role of individual characteristics such as personal value systems, and at an organizational level, in terms of the influence of organizational characteristics such as organizational culture. The paper then goes on to examine the extent to which this empirically-based account of ethical decision making is congruent with, or runs contrary to, some of the main theoretical propositions contained in the ethical decision-making literature. This provided only limited empirical support for the theoretical propositions described in the literature. In particular, the findings of the empirical work reported here suggest that while personal values may play a part in organizational ethics, the ethical decision-making process itself is subject to a much greater influence from the everyday demands and commercial pressures which managers perceived as being placed upon them in the types of organizations examined in this study. Thus, while supportive of the notion that values may be important in some respects, the study suggests that they are not necessarily that closely involved with the actual decision-making process. Rather the evidence gathered in this study indicates that they can exert an affectively-mediated retrospective effect. This possibility would suggest a reformulation of the role of values in the ethical decision-making process, while also calling for a greater emphasis upon the role of emotions. These are, however, only tentative findings and must therefore be subject to further empirical work before the precise way in which ethical issues arise, unfold and are dealt with in the workplace can be understood.

Recent years have brought significant advances in research on behavioral ethics. However, research on ethical decision making is still in a nascent stage. Our objective in this paper is twofold: First, we argue that the practice of mindfulness may have significant positive effects on ethical decision making in organizations. More specifically, we will discuss the benefits of “reperceiving” – a meta-mechanism in the practice of mindfulness for ethical decision making and we provide an overview of mindfulness research pertaining to ethical decision making. Subsequently, we explore areas in which neuroscience research may inform research on ethics in organizations. We conclude that both neuroscience and mindfulness offer considerable promise to the field of ethical decision making.

Cognitive moral development, often referred to as moral reasoning, stems from the field of cognitive developmental psychology and moral psychology. Early work done by Jean Piaget studying the cognitive abilities of children to make moral judgments as they grow and mature created the foundation for the later work of Lawrence Kohlberg and James Rest in studying the moral reasoning abilities of adults. Thus, moral reasoning refers to the cognitive process of how a person reasons about ethical situations. This chapter will present the evolution of the use and validity of cognitive moral development/moral reasoning in determining how individuals resolve ethical or moral dilemmas. Further, more recent models and potential measurement of moral reasoning and ethical decision-making including our intuition and emotions will be discussed and suggestions regarding directions for developing methods to measure such cognitive and emotional (or intuitive) means by which individuals make difficult moral choices will be discussed.

Exemplars play a central role in business ethics and ethical decision-making. In general terms, an exemplar is defined as ‘a person or thing to be copied’ and can include persons who have their sense of moral commitment as a core part of their sense of self, take a principled personal stand or a role model or an organisation committed to certain moral standards or other things such as case studies, anecdotes, and even fables and myths. Researchers have used different approaches to explain the role of exemplars in decision-making in general and ethical decision-making in particular. This paper presents evidence of SME managers acknowledging the role of exemplars in the management of their businesses and in their ethical decision-making processes.

Semi-structured, open-ended interviews were conducted in an exploratory manner with 20 owners/senior managers of SMEs in Australia. Two types of exemplars were identified in the analysis – individual and organisational, and indicated the prominence of individual exemplars over organisational exemplars. Analysis also suggests the use of multiple exemplars, learning moral behaviours, getting inspired, learning ethical decision-making skills and the ability to retrieve exemplar representations from memory to influence judgements and decisions.

This study provides an insight into one of the methods employed by SME managers in ethical decision-making. Findings could be useful in making SME managers aware of their penchant of using exemplars. The paper contributes to the knowledge in the area of one of the many methods that SME managers use in ethical decision-making.

This chapter aims to provide an overview of the ethical framework and decision-making in clinical dementia research, and to analyze and discuss the ethical challenges and issues that can arise when conducting clinical dementia research.

Informed consent is the most scrutinized and controversial aspect of clinical research ethics. In clinical dementia research, assessing decision-making capacity may be challenging as the nature and progress of each disease influences decision-making capacity in diverse ways. Persons with dementia represent a vulnerable population deserving special attention when developing, implementing, and evaluating the informed consent process. In this chapter, particular attention will be given to vulnerability categories and how these influence decision-making capacity. Ethical frameworks with a pragmatic contour and implication are needed to protect vulnerable patients from potential harms and ensure their optimal participation in clinical dementia research.

In addition, this chapter analyses important ethical challenges and issues in clinical dementia research. If handled thoughtfully, they would not pose insuperable barriers to research. But if they are ignored, they could slow the research process, alienate potential study subjects and cause harm to research participants. Ethical considerations in research involving persons with dementia primarily concern the representation of the interests of the participants with dementia and protection of their vulnerabilities and rights.

A core set of ethical questions and recommendations are drawn to aid researchers, institutional review boards and potential research participants in the process of participating in clinical dementia research.

In this chapter, we explore the ethical dilemmas commonly faced in community development projects, providing guidance for practitioners and policy makers. We delve into various challenges, from resource allocation to managing diverse stakeholder needs, using ethical theories and real-world case studies, including examples from the Ecuadorian Amazon Rainforest, Haiti Earthquake relief, and an Indigenous education program in Australia. We emphasize the importance of ethical decision-making, showcasing the potential impacts of choices on communities and individuals. Practical strategies are presented to maintain ethical integrity, such as transparent communication and accountability mechanisms, enabling stakeholders to navigate dilemmas with sensitivity and uphold ethical standards. This chapter serves as a valuable guide for those involved in community development, fostering sustainable and equitable initiatives that empower communities and drive positive transformation.

In the context of cultural diversity and democratization in Nepal, ethical decision making with the central focus on the paradigms of care, justice, and critique is perceived as highly imperative in the life of school principals. However, the way each principal decides to remain ethical differs in practice as his or her own individual and school constructs vary from the other. The difference is much visible in the decision-making process of men and women principals. Considering this, a case study of men and women principals was carried out and the result showed that sociocultural constructs of the principals is primarily responsible to create the differences between them in terms of their ethical decision-making process. Sociocultural context of principals is not in the favor of the women’s decisive role, and thus women principals in their workplace make decisions after having several rounds of consultations. This serves to make their decision constructive as compared to the men principals who hardly consult in the decision-making process.