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While morality is ever-present in elections, scholars have yet to merge political public relations and Moral Foundations Theory. It is crucial to assess the complex morality present not only in social deduction, but also in political strategic communication. The current work aims to analyze the issue agendas and their relationships in the 2020 presidential campaign and assesses their moral strategy.

This study used a computer-assisted content analysis (N = 7,888) with each moral intuition coded from the Moral Foundations Dictionary. Datapoints included campaign tweets, Facebook posts, debate performances, remarks, news releases and nomination acceptance speeches. Coverage included articles from including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CNN and Fox News to assess both liberal and conservative media.

Candidates' issue and moral agendas were correlated with each other and with the media's agenda. Comparatively, the Biden campaign has stronger correlations when it came to connecting with issues, stakeholders and moral intuitions in the media agenda than the Trump campaign. For issues, the Biden campaign prioritized COVID-19 and the economy, while the Trump campaign prioritized the economy and crime. The candidates also had similar moral strategies.

This study suggests effectively leveraging organizational communications in democracies can support the transfer of object salience, moral attributes and networks to media coverage, public discourse and opponent messaging. It can also help achieve organizational goals by managing public image, reputation and expectations.

This work expands the literature by taking a pluralist moral psychology approach in assessing the salience and correlation of five moral intuitions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. This study serves as a springboard for examining morality's impact on political public relations.

This study aims to investigate the effects of attribution of responsibility (AOR) for layoffs on the components of ethical decision-making. Internal, external and no-fault AOR were examined using the model of moral intensity to determine if placement of blame for the layoff influences ethical awareness, judgment and intent.

Surveys were collected from 397 students. The survey provided a scenario about a layoff situation involving an African-American woman and a Caucasian woman. Respondents then answered questions about moral intensity, moral judgment and moral intent concerning the layoff and identified the reasons they believed the layoff occurred. We tested our hypotheses using multiple regression analysis.

Subjects were more likely to make a moral judgment about the situation when layoffs were blamed on the company’s actions (external AOR) and less likely to make a moral judgment when the layoff decision was blamed on employee performance (internal AOR) or on economic factors beyond anyone’s control (no-fault AOR). Results also indicate that layoffs blamed on employee performance negatively moderate the relationship between moral judgment and moral intent.

Previous studies of layoff ethics have not examined the influence of AOR for layoffs using the model of moral intensity. Thus, this paper extends the current understanding of these concepts in ethical decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is to examine US public relations professionals' perceptions of the benefits and challenges associated with the concept of moral entrepreneurship, defined as the purposeful process of changing or creating new institutionalized ethical norms. This study argues that the concept of moral entrepreneurship provides organizations with a potentially valuable framework to actively recognize societal pressures and problems and act accordingly to better the environment in which the organization resides and operates.

This exploratory study uses purposive in-depth interviews with 25 diverse public relations professionals, who represented communication firms, in-house public relations departments, higher education, nonprofits and government.

Respondents assigned a high value to the concept of moral entrepreneurship: In addition to its being viewed as the right thing to do, they recognized its practice as a way to help organizations recruit and retain employee talent and improve stakeholder trust. However, based on the interviews, organizational leadership is the primary initiator of ethical changes; therefore, without a seat at the management table, practitioners lack the influence to initiate such new organizational directions and take on the role of moral entrepreneurs only when directed to do so by their superiors. Barriers to adopting a moral entrepreneurship approach included a limited budget and shortage of staff, employees' resistance to change, fear of failure, poor leadership and a politically polarized workplace.

Practice implications include considerations for furthering moral entrepreneurship in organizations.

This study is the first to explore the applicability of the concept of moral entrepreneurship in public relations. The paper underscores the need for further discussion around novel approaches to ethics in public relations that go beyond simple compliance with professional codes and industry standards and that help organizations lead societal change.

Emergency organizations allocate specific tasks to responders in an attempt to resolve increasingly complex incidents. Many studies take a pragmatic perspective by studying how emergency organizations can more effectively compartmentalize response tasks. Yet, the effects of compartmentalization on responders' sensemaking of moral issues (i.e. moral sensemaking) has received almost no attention.

Based on existing research, the authors bring together different insights on the relation between compartmentalization and emergency responders’ sensemaking of moral issues.

The authors demonstrate that emergency organizations may undermine the moral sensemaking of responders through introducing moral blind spots and moral dissociation or, instead, enable moral sensemaking through enhancing moral agency and awareness. The authors argue that emergency organizations need to induce moral sense-discrediting among responders to enhance their moral sensemaking. Finally, the authors conclude with discussing two types of compartmentalizing tasks, functional concentration and the holographic metaphor, to show that the latter is most likely to enhance moral sensemaking among emergency responders.

This study introduces moral sensemaking to the emergency management literature and investigates how organizational design influences it.

This exploratory research examined how emphasizing a brand’s unethical behaviour through high moral intensity news framing influences consumer boycott intention.

The hypotheses were tested and validated using two experimental studies that expose customers of real retail and personal care product brands to news articles that have high and low moral intensity news frames.

The results showed high moral intensity news framing’s positive effect on consumer boycott intention. The frame’s influence is moderated by moral awareness and partially mediated by perceived moral intensity and moral judgement. The findings suggest that consumers’ perception of the frame and their attitude towards the brand will have a substantial role in boycott intention.

These research outcomes aid in the understanding of news framing effects on boycott intention, providing both insights for consumer activists and managerial implications for stewards of brands.

While previous research have examined the impact of news frames on the typical audience, there has been relatively little focus on news framing’s impact on consumers and their decision to boycott brands. This study addresses this gap by applying the work on emphasis framing to a consumer decision-making context. It also introduces moral intensity framing to the news frame classification. In addition, this study expands current conceptualizations of individual ethical decision-making to help explain consumer boycott intent.

This study aims to clarify the psychological mechanism of international contractors' fraud by linking performance pressure to fraudulent intention through the displacement of responsibility and addressing the moderating role of moral intensity.

Based on moral disengagement theory, performance pressure was hypothesized to be positively associated with fraudulent intention by mediating the displacement of responsibility. Drawing on the issue-contingent theory, moral intensity was hypothesized to inhibit the relationship between performance pressure and displacement of responsibility in three aspects: magnitude of consequences (MC), probability of effect (PE) and social consensus (SC). The scenario-based questionnaire was conducted to collect information from contractors spread across 50 countries. The partial least squares structural equation modeling was employed to assess the proposed model.

The results demonstrated that performance pressure was positively associated with the fraudulent intention, and displacement of responsibility exerted a positive partial mediating impact between performance pressure and fraudulent intention. Regarding moral intensity in the moderating analysis, the negative moderating role of MC and PE was significant, while that of SC was insignificant.

This study provides international construction practitioners with a deep understanding of the formation mechanism of fraud at the psychological level.

It clarifies the psychological mechanism from performance pressure to fraudulent intention by integrating a mediation impact from the displacement of responsibility and a moderation effect from MC and PE. It contributes to the sparse research on how situational factors shape individuals' fraudulent intentions in the international context. It provides a fresh perspective on fraud by constructing a formation model from moral psychological theories.

This paper aims to explore the common ethical decision-making challenges faced by financial advisers and how they meet these challenges. The purpose is to identify successful decision-making tools used by investment advisers in doing business ethically. Additionally, the authors uncover common challenges and offer decision-making tools to provide support for supplemental ethics training in the future.

Questions were analyzed through a qualitative approach using individual interviews to examine a range of experiences and attitudes of active financial advisers. The sample was represented by 11 practicing financial advisers affiliated with US independent broker-dealers: six women and five men, each with 10 or more years of experience, ranging in age from 35 to 75. Grounded in four ethical decision-making models, this research examines individual ethical decision-making using individual (internal, personal) and organizational (external, situational) factors.

The method used uncovered struggles and revealed strategies used in making ethical decisions. Two research questions were examined: what are the common ethical decision-making challenges faced by financial advisers in the US financial industry? How do financial advisers handle ethical decision-making challenges? Four themes emerged that impacted ethical decision-making: needs of the individual, needs of others, needs of the firm and needs of the marketplace. Financial advisers identified moral obligation, self-control and consulting with others as major considerations when they contemplate difficult decisions.

A limitation of this review is its small sample size. A more robust sample size from investment advisers with a broader range of experiences could have widened the findings from the study.

Investment advisers can use the findings of this study as a tool for improving their own ethical decision-making or designing training for their employees to be better decision-makers.

The study explores the decision-making experiences of investment advisers to reveal multifaceted, often private struggles that qualitative methods can uncover. The study provides support for the development of additional training in ethical decision-making specific to investment advisers.

We explore how sustainable management education (SME) can help prepare future leaders to manage crises effectively. Precisely, the intricacies of articulating moral and economic imperatives for businesses in a manner that engages students in sustainable behavior are a serious challenge for SME. We study how to integrate reminders of moral and economic imperatives in a socially responsible investment (SRI) stock-picking simulation created for SME.

Adopting an experimental design, we analyzed how the reminders affected the average environment social governance (ESG) integration in the portfolios of 127 graduate students in finance over a twelve-week period.

Our results show how essential it is to balance the two imperatives. The highest level of sustainable investment is attained when utilizing both reminders.

Our findings have practical implications for implementing and organizing SME in business schools to educate responsible leaders who are able to effectively manage crises. Learning responsible management is most effective when students are exposed to the inherent tension between moral and economic imperatives. Hence, our findings corroborate the win-win conception of SME.

No management decision study has experimentally measured the effects of SME practices on students' actual behavior. Our research fills this gap by complementing previous studies on the effectiveness of teaching practices, first by drawing on behavioral sciences and measuring changes in students' actual sustainability behavior and second by introducing moral and economic imperatives into an innovative teaching resource (TR) dedicated to SME.

This study aims to explore the determinants of the green purchase behaviour (GPB) of environment-friendly and energy-efficient electronic products market. It specifically examines the moderating effect of consumers’ moral identity on the relationships between the consumption values and GPB of environment-friendly and energy-efficient electronic products market. It also examines the direct relationship between consumption values and GPB.

In this study, the theory of consumption values is combined with the moral identity of consumers. A structured questionnaire mall-intercept survey was used to collect data from 396 respondents, which was subsequently processed using the smart PLS software for partial least square structural equation modelling analysis.

Findings reveal that functional value, social value, conditional value and epistemic value are the significant predictors of GPB of the environment-friendly and energy-efficient electronic products market. The moral identity of consumers also appears to positively moderate the relationships between functional, emotional and conditional values and the GPB.

The energy efficiency of electronic products is included in this study as an additional feature of functional value, while government support and business promotional initiatives are incorporated as the new elements of conditional value. Therefore, the inclusion and evaluation of the moral identity of consumers, alongside new elements of functional and conditional values in the theory of consumption values, could be considered a significant theoretical addition. The study uncovered certain customer insights that could help accelerate the adoption of green electronic products, which may result in better energy savings, reduced carbon emissions and environmental safety.

Since the idea of “Unethical Pro-organisational Behaviour” (UPB) was introduced in 2010, a substantial corpus of empirical research has contributed to its expanding, contemporary knowledge. This includes research studies on how leadership exerts an influence on UPB. This paper aims to consolidate the current understanding of organisational leadership’s impact on employee UPB and offer future research agendas.

A systematic literature review (SLR) using the “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses” (PRISMA) guidelines was adopted for the study. Literature that satisfied the search conditions was examined. The factors determining leadership’s influence on UPB were studied, and the findings were thematically synthesised.

Leader behaviour plays a large part in influencing UPB in organisations. Leader-member exchange and organisational belonging create favourable circumstances for UPB in organisations. UPB is moderated by the employee’s personal moral orientation.

UPB is unethical behaviour that benefits the organisation and is likely to be rewarded. However, there is a cost that other stakeholders pay. UPB has been researched since 2010, as well as the role of leaders in perpetuating UPB. However, there has not been an SLR of this study. This paper seeks to capture the essence of the research so far and pave a path for future research on the subject. These insights would prove valuable to management practitioners and academic experts.