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Moral exemplarity is a desirable but complex achievement. The chapter discusses the meaning of moral exemplarity and examines how the self, as a psychological and spiritual centre within a Jungian perspective, contributes to fostering moral commitment.

A narrative study was conducted amongst ten spiritual healers in New Zealand and France. Stories were collected and analysed interpretively to uncover meaningful patterns about spiritual healers’ moral stance and apprehension of the self.

Spiritual healers demonstrated a deep commitment to the self which clearly sustained a commitment to serve or help others. Commitment to the self was articulated around five core values: self-work, self-reflection, humility, self-integrity and love.

The chapter highlights the moral value of inner work. The self, in its archetypal sense, carries as potential an ‘innate morality’ that resonates in the heart and nurtures integrity and authenticity. To commit to the self requires undertaking a long and painful exploration of the psyche and integrating unconscious material into ego-consciousness. The participating spiritual healers, who had committed to their self and were well advanced on their psychological exploration journey, displayed moral qualities akin to exemplarity.

While much of the existing research regarding moral exemplarity has focused on living individuals, examination of the lives of historical figures can also prove invaluable in understanding moral motivation. Consequently, this paper sought to apply Frimer and Walker’s (2009) reconciliation model and methodology in examining themes of agency and communion in the motivation of Miep Gies. Frimer and Walker’s (2009) Self-Understanding Interview and the VEiN coding method (Frimer, Walker, & Dunlop, 2009) served as guides for examining published and audio-recorded interviews, biographical and autobiographical information, as well as video-recorded speeches given by Gies. Aspects of an integrated moral identity appeared evident in the personality of Miep Gies as indicated in statements reflecting an overlap of both agency and communion. The study was limited in its reliance on publically available documents about or by Gies. Further, reliance on these documents, as opposed to a “live” interview, limited the ability of the author to identify responses to all questions included in Frimer and Walker’s (2009) interview or fully utilize the VEiN coding method (Frimer et al., 2009). Exploration of life narratives of historical figures can provide insight into an integrated moral identity as well as examples of developmental crossroads Frimer and Walker (2009) cited as essential in their reconciliation model. Comprehension of this reconciliation process is critical to understanding what lies at the heart of moral motivation and action as well as the ability to promote such growth in the lives of others.

This chapter explains organizational accountability in context of a revolutionary change by the emotional capability of an organization and the ethical orientation of its top executives. Four situations lead to four propositions accounting for the level and durability of an organization's accountability. This chapter fills a gap in the literature by articulating two antecedents of organizational accountability, underlines the relevance of organizational ethics, and extends the realm of emotion management to strategic organizational outcomes.

Moral exemplars provide us with important case studies of optimal moral flourishing. Although most historians rate Abraham Lincoln as the most moral American president, their analyses do not utilize the perspective of moral development theory or research. This project asked whether such a perspective could contribute to a better understanding of Lincoln’s abundantly well-examined self and actions. This study examined the moral self of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln through close textual analysis of his brief autobiographical writings and his ethical turning point, his 1854 Peoria Speech attacking the morality of slavery. Even the limited sample of one major speech and three brief writings about life events provided evidence for the usefulness of McAdams’ method of examining life narratives for central themes and textual elements and for Colby and Damon’s (1992) method of interviewing exemplars and identifying common traits. Our methods allowed for no carefully constructed interview or clarification questions but rather relied on historical texts constructed for political goals. Major figures in the exploration of moral selves suggest that the centrality of morality to people’s sense of self lies at the heart of moral motivation and action. Studies of historical moral exemplars provide individuals and organizations with powerful role models for optimal ethical functioning and highlight the importance of fostering the centrality of morality in organizational leaders.

This research objective was to explore how Romanian IT family businesses' co-founders enable entrepreneuring through familiness practices. The authors explored what familiness practices emerge and how these are facilitated and supported by the rhetoric framework.

Drawing on Romanian IT entrepreneurs' practice from five case studies of IT family businesses and purposive revelatory cases, the authors considered the family co-founders' narratives and representations of familiness presented in 31 interviews.

The respondents' communication in entrepreneuring is a joint collaborative effort of the family co-founders to function well. Family entrepreneurs generate positive perceptions in favour of enterprising families using persuasive communication via rhetoric appeals to familiness ethos, familiness logos and familiness pathos, leading to constructive conflict management. The rhetoric of persuasion supports family entrepreneuring.

The authors conducted multiple case studies, profiling technological co-founders and family entrepreneurs in the challenging circumstances of an emerging economy.

The analysis of the use of rhetoric contributes to a better understanding of familiness practices in the family business. Through appeals to ethos, family business entrepreneurs enforce family values built on shared history, complementarity and moral exemplarity. The appeals to logos in entrepreneuring involve fulfilling complementary roles, alignment and continuous learning and coaching. The appeals to pathos are about emotions and how the family entrepreneurs' discourse enforces constructive handling of emotions.

The perceived familiness communicated through appeals to ethos, logos and pathos contributes to legitimating the family firm structures.

Theorising from family entrepreneurs' familiness practices, the authors suggest that entrepreneuring requires good communication of the representation of familiness for co-founders, employees and other stakeholders to also serve constructive conflict handling. The perceived familiness communicated through appeals to ethos, logos and pathos helps family businesses leverage their unique strengths and resources in the entrepreneuring process.

The purpose of this paper is to study the status of the individual self in the emergence of change initiatives in organizations.

This theoretical paper examines the emergence of change initiatives through the building of agents’ capacity to act, based on a theory of action inspired by Paul Ricœur.

This paper identifies the “course of recognition” to favor the emergence of change initiatives and the building of the capacity to act of agents, respecting the autonomy at the individual level, a sense of care at the group level and justice at the institutional level.

The theoretical research can be extended with empirical studies dealing with the role of agents’ capacities in conflict management, the role of the “narrative self´” in change processes in organizations and the conjoint operationalization of autonomy care and justice to determine the agents’ capacity to act for initiatives to emerge.

It is important to develop a sense of shared leadership to nurture the capacity to act of agents to make change initiatives emerge in organizations, increasing organizational members’ feelings of being recognized.

So far, research has not provided satisfactory answers to the question about how to best initiate organizational change. The use of Ricœur’s theory of action adds value to the existing approaches as it addresses the source of the emergence of initiatives from agents’ feelings of their capacity to act, and integrates individual, group and institutional levels, which are rarely contemplated together.

This research uses identity theory to examine the individual variability in moral behavior for acts of commission (committing a bad act) and omission (failing to do a good act). Most research using identity theory has examined behavior in the active sense as in doing something while neglecting behavior in the passive sense as in not doing something. Doing something may carry more information as to who one is than not doing something. Thus, behavior in the active sense may be more likely to implicate the self and thus activate the identity process than behavior in the passive sense. I investigate this by placing individuals in the moral dilemma of a testing situation in which they have the opportunity to cheat (an act of commission) (Condition 1) or not report that they were over-scored on a test (an act of omission) (Condition 2). Participants' moral identities and emotions are obtained. The results reveal that the identity process helps explain moral behavior and emotions for an act of commission but not an act of omission. The results suggest that compared to an omitted act, a committed act generates more cognitive processing as to who one is thereby activating the identity process. Furthermore, in omission, individuals may not see themselves as responsible for an outcome, thus failing to frame the situation in moral terms – as having done a bad thing.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how individuals seek to reduce the occurrence of unethical requests at work and the effects of such strategies.

The authors built a grounded theory through semi-structured interviews with 65 individuals who worked for companies involved in the Brazilian corruption scandal called Operation Car Wash.

The interviewees reported that they use two central strategies to avoid unethical requests: explicit moral communication (directly stating that they are not willing to adhere to an unethical request) and implicit communication (expressing such a refusal through moral symbols). Both strategies signal the morality of the communicator and lead the possible proponent of an unethical request to perceive a greater probability of being reported and, thus, avoid making such an unethical request. However, while explicit moral communication affects the perceived morality of the individual who would possibly make an unethical request, implicit (symbolic) moral communication does not. As a consequence, the risks of retaliation for making a moral communication are greater in the case of explicit moral communication, entailing that implicit moral communication is more effective and safer for the individual who wants to avoid unethical requests.

This paper broadens the literature on business ethics and moral psychology by shifting its focus from what organizations and leaders can do to prevent unethical behavior to what leaders can actively do to protect themselves from unethical requests.