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The purpose of this paper is to call to public leaders to exercise moral courage in choosing to understand and address phobic biases and prejudicial attitudes toward Muslims in the workplace. With reference to developments in the USA, workplace discrimination is framed as an ethical issue, with Islamophobia viewed as a rapidly growing concern.

This work is a practical application of existing theory and research in positive organizational scholarship to address the concern of workplace discrimination; specifically Islamophobia. Propositions are developed to depict how public leaders can address Islamophobia and other forms of discrimination by role modeling moral courage.

The findings show that Islamophobia is an ethical challenge for public leaders, one that can begin to be addressed by exercising character strength that promotes tolerance, civility, and respect. This proactive approach will enable public leaders to serve as pillars of openness, inclusion, and thoughtful regard for others, regardless of organizational members’ faith or culture.

The social implications are to encourage discourse among global public leaders, prompting awareness and concern for Islamophobia and promoting more informed paths for productive scholarship.

Studies of workplace discrimination typically focus on race and gender, with few considering how Muslims face increasing Islamophobia. This work adds value to the existing literature by explicitly encouraging public leaders to respond, rather than react, to discrimination with moral competency.

Organizational development and change may be initiated from two different starting points. A diagnostic approach begins with an examination of problems to assess and correct dysfunction. In contrast, the Appreciative Inquiry approach begins by identifying an organization’s strengths as resources for change. An experimental study was conducted to compare the processes and outcomes that arise during the first phase of each approach. Results show that both approaches lead to different but favorable and complementary outcomes. Both participant gender and the gender construction of the dyads in which individuals participated moderate these effects in unexpected ways. The implications for understanding the processes by which both methods work, and the potential for combining them, are discussed

Managers’ willingness to proceed with right action can be diminished by the need for approval and feeling the negative emotions that often accompany ethical challenges. This paper seeks to describe Balanced Experiential Inquiry (BEI), a learning activity designed to help managers develop sustained moral performance.

Using their past experiences for reflective learning, managers engage in BEI to understand what promotes and curtails their ability to respond to ethical issues.

A field study showed that managers engaging in BEI perceived less need for praise from others and experienced a reduction in negative emotions.

Future research evaluating BEI should use a control group, diverse sample, and a longitudinal design that tracks outcomes over time.

Application of BEI is a promising mechanism to help organizations bolster managers’ internal desires to stay on an ethical decision‐making path.

The paper shows that shared reflection and dialogue are needed to help foster responsibility and build ethical strength in organizational settings.

This article aims to draw insight from a variety of management disciplines to encourage a broader view of the economy as it relates to sustainable waste management (SWM) development.

The paper presents a framework to describe how strengths can be blended to support environmental sustainability (ES), highlighting the need for community cooperation between the informal and formal sectors of the economy.

Unique contributions for SWM can emerge from both economic sectors and, when leveraged, may drive community development within local municipalities.

The platform addresses the need for more flexible governmental policies that encourage waste management activities among formal and informal workers.

The paper brings forward typically disregarded ES waste management opportunities that reside within the informal sector, an often overlooked aspect of the broader economy.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on an inward drive and commitment toward ethical discovery, which the authors refer to as the competency of moral curiosity. When directed toward moral decision making, the authors believe this ability can help managers effectively respond to their ethical challenges and contribute to an organizational environment that supports ethical performance.

After presenting insights from the literature on curiosity and establishing its relevance, the authors describe a specific experiential learning tool designed to cultivate moral curiosity in organizational settings. The authors conduct a field study using this process to explore how moral curiosity can be strengthened through experiential practice.

Results from the field study suggest that engagement in balanced experiential inquiry, a process that asks managers to reflect on their salient ethical dilemmas and then engage in both individual and collective meaning making, positively influenced participants’ curiosity toward moral decision making.

Limitations include challenges inherent to the field-study design, including lack of a control group and limited ability to predict long-term impacts of the intervention. Despite these concerns, the study has useful implications for managerial training and development. In particular, providing safe spaces where managers can discuss their ethical dilemmas is an important element of supporting their development into morally curious leaders who are interested in pursuing business ethics.

Findings suggest that providing safe spaces where managers can discuss their ethical dilemmas is an important element of supporting their development into morally curious leaders who are interested in pursuing business ethics.

The paper contributes to the research literature on ethics training and education for managers. The authors introduce the construct of moral curiosity as a competency that can be developed through experiential practice in organizational settings.

Patience is underestimated in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of patience and the individual and organizational benefits it confers. Then, the paper discuses emotional self-regulation and explain how two self-regulatory techniques can affect the patience of individuals in organizations.

The paper considers religious, philosophical, and psychological perspectives on patience; and highlight the emotional underpinnings of patience.

The paper argues that patience plays an important role in organizations and that individuals can use emotional self-regulation to enhance their patience. The paper offers two key points about the relationship between self-regulation strategies and patience: first, situation selection mitigates the need for patience and second cognitive reappraisal facilitates the execution of patient responses and the development of the virtue itself.

The paper provides recommendations for increasing individuals’ patience in organizational settings.

The virtue of patience has received scant research attention. This paper focusses on the importance of patience in the workplace and examines how emotional self-regulation can facilitate its activation.

This chapter reviews literature in support of a model that predicts the effects of Appreciative Inquiry on physical health in the workplace. Studies that demonstrate the physiological correlates associated with the experience of appreciation are examined. A model of emotion is proposed that shows how the heart, in concert with the brain, nervous, and hormonal systems, are fundamental components of a dynamic network from which emotional experience emerges. The authors demonstrate how favorable affective experiences and appreciative processes go hand in hand – and suggest the need for further empirical investigations in the field of positive organizational change practices.

The marginalization of Muslims can foster anxiety, anger, or fear in the workplace. Such negative reactions may prompt incivility among coworkers, denigrating a thoughtful regard for others. While legal protections are intended to promote fairness, mandates do not always prevent discrimination. As a result, management needs to frame anti-Muslimism as an ethical issue and proactively cultivate environments that support respect. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

To understand how anti-Muslimism may emerge in organizational settings, this work defines Islamophobia and examines how it manifests as workplace discrimination. The extant literature on the subject and a sample of anti-Muslim discrimination cases are studied to better understand this phenomenon.

An analysis of representative Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cases shows that a lack of accommodation for religious practices is a major ethical issue. Management can proactively address value tensions by creating safe spaces for organizational learning. Balanced experiential inquiry is offered as a process to help employees reveal their embedded biases through personal reflection and collective inquiry.

If managers intend to encourage equity and inclusion, they need to foster organizational learning that tackles emerging forms of discrimination like Islamophobia. A sustained focus on moral development becomes an imperative toward establishing an ethical climate and a workplace that fosters respect for all organizational members.

Because organizations are at the intersection of business and society, it is incumbent upon managers to create environments that reject hostilities toward those who may be perceived as different.

In today’s sociopolitical climate, the concern of discrimination toward Muslims is a mainstream ethical issue. A compliance-based approach to advance organizational ethics is not enough. The authors present a way forward, building moral strength through moral competency.