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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.

Regarding managers' sensemaking of ethical content, this paper aims to help understand how managers come to believe what is important for business ethics and to improve understanding about their ethical work orientations.

The method used was a qualitative approach that analyzed 23 in‐depth interviews conducted with managers in various settings.

Three categories of ethical sense‐making orientations were identified: the proactive managers; the institutional managers; the technical managers. The study follows a discussion of the significance of these categories in terms of ethics in management, focusing on the extent to which the individual or the organization appears to drive ethical dilemmas.

Five main limitations are discussed. It was not the aim of the study to provide an explanatory model for the process of ethical sensemaking and managers' work orientations. The sample of managers used in the study is only indicative of managers' ethical work orientations.

Managers have different ethical work orientations that relate to their personal identities. These categories may provide a framework for future research on additional types of professionals, organizations and cultural settings. For example, the institutional ethical managers are easier for organizations to control since they seem to rely on company rules.

The paper is valuable for management scholars and practitioners in the field of management. Since not much has been written about the sensemaking of managers and business ethics, the paper examines how some managers were more proactive than others in identifying ethical content in unexpected situations.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the behaviours described by expatriates (“what expatriates say they do”) when they are pressed for adjustment and, at the same time, they feel ethically challenged.

The authors interviewed 52 expatriates from the European Union working in Sub-Saharan Africa who were immersed in what was considered by them to be an ethically challenging context or situation while they were in the process of adjusting to their international assignment. The authors conducted a reflexive qualitative analysis between the data and existing literature.

The authors found that the feeling of moral discomfort that causes the perception of an ethical challenge is triggered by an event that contrasts with the expatriates’ notion of morals. After feeling ethically challenged, expatriates engage in a sensemaking process that is hinged in an “intended future identity”.

The authors contribute to the literature by stressing the ethical dimension of adjustment. The authors complement the normative approaches to ethical decision making in international contexts. The research identifies a set of events that are considered as ethical challenges by business expatriates.

The research opens the possibility to anticipate and manage potential conflicts, thus minimizing the probability of expatriation failure. Early knowledge about an expatriate's intended future identity can provide relevant information concerning the probable type of adjustment problems s/he will face.

The research combines two hitherto separate streams of literature – expatriate adjustment and ethical decision making in international contexts – to open the possibility of ethical adjustment. This is supported by a sensemaking process that is also grounded in future intentions, and not only in past experiences and present signals.

The purpose of this paper is to deal with the link between identity and crisis deriving by natural disasters, exploring the function of the shared identity linking individuals, groups, organizations and its external networks. The shared identity is not static. It is a dynamic self-reflexive learning process and is reciprocal. The object of the research is a medium-sized multi-utility company, which experienced the 2012 earthquakes, and how responsibly and rapidly it responded and recovered in collaboration with its stakeholders in the local territory.

Semi-structured interviews were directed to both managers and to selected representatives of the “vertical external networks” of the company (local authorities, a consumer association and a trade association). The primary data were supplemented by archived materials for data triangulation.

The research highlights the importance of identity and relationship with local stakeholders and communities when facing the earthquakes. Believing themselves to be socially responsible, ethical and capable, employees were highly motivated and collaborative. Resuming normal services was AIMAG’s priority. The behavior of AIMAG, its employees and its local stakeholders were guided by a shared community identity. After the earthquakes, this shared community identity was strengthened, thus improving the community’s resilience.

The paper highlights the role of identity in linking both inside and outside an organization, in contributing greatly to joint decision making and action, and, finally, in increasing the awareness of the company leaders and staff regarding the importance of their actions for the whole local community. This research advocates the role of identity in disaster risk reduction.

The purpose of the paper is to propose a framework for researching the possibilities for project manager identities: the multiple ways there are of being a performer, as a manager, in the world of projects.

The author's line of enquiry was to seek evidence of project manager identity within real‐life stories told by practitioners, the author's perspective being: that identity is produced through action, that action and identity are framed by social narratives, and that identities and the strategies that create and support them are therefore evident in project stories.

Two examples are discussed; they validate the proposed research framework, demonstrating how storytellers use their projects as vehicles for the performance of their personal professional “project manager identity”.

The form of the stories is crucial to what their analysis can reveal about identities. The personal stories (narrating the storyteller's own experience) must be, in essence, complete, told by individuals addressing situations that challenge them.

The primary purpose of this research is to inform personal learning and educational programmes. An enriched understanding of what it means to be a professional in the project world can enhance the awareness of individuals learning to perform roles, and making choices in this field.

The analysis of stories has been used previously as a research methodology to critique projects and power structures. This paper makes proposals to extend the use of such analysis into the realm of personal identity and its construction.

This paper forwards a conceptual model identifying some of the key sources of judgment error in individual environmental sensemaking. Recommendations are offered to mitigate some of these biasing dysfunctions and thereby improve the effectiveness of environmentally related business policy.

Theories of cognitive and behavioral sciences are reviewed and applied to create a conceptual model describing some of the key influences on individual sensemaking in regard to environmental risk and opportunity.

It is found that the model presented in this paper contributes to the literature of corporate social responsibility in explaining some of the heuristic phenomena that can lead to denial of a firm's negative environmental impact, or conversely, recognition of emerging opportunities arising from increasing societal concern for environmental integrity. Many environmental scientists believe denial is omnipresent in modern business and governmental organizations. In addition, because the model is grounded in well‐established theories of problematic heuristic bias, it helps identify “leverage points” where well‐designed interventions can be deployed to promote learning and improved decision making. The model helps the decision maker better understand and potentially influence ethical judgment because ethical decision making is conceived within the frame of bounded ethicality versus a less potent theory of intervention based upon espoused moral prescriptions.

Some important influences on environmental sensemaking are not emphasized in the model to include dimensions of individual personality, early childhood experiences, gender, religious background, etc. Rather, the emphasis here is placed upon relatively ubiquitous cognitive heuristics and other cognitive phenomena likely to influence many organizational decision makers.

This analysis and resulting conceptual model should help change agents, students, policy makers and business practitioners avoid predictable biases and sensemaking distortions and, in so doing, improve the firm's social responsibility profile and recognition of emerging business opportunities growing out of sustainability imperatives.

The widespread use of communication technologies and social media platforms such as the #ME TOO movement has amplified the importance for business leaders to demonstrate high standards of ethical behavior for career success. Although the concept of ethical leadership has been widely investigated, a theoretical framework from a career perspective does not yet exist.

This study draws from sensemaking theory to argue that career identity salience shapes leaders' communication behavior to influence the extent to which they are perceived to be ethical by subordinates. We test our hypotheses using multisource data with a sample (n = 337) of business managers.

The results show that career identity salience has positive influence on communication competence, which positively influences ethical leadership. We further find that communication frequency positively moderates the relationship between communication competence and ethical leadership.

The theoretical and practical implications that, motivated by their career identity, career-ambitious leaders can manipulate subordinates' perceptions of their ethical behavior are discussed along with suggestions for future research.

To our knowledge, this is the first research to provide a career perspective on ethical leadership.

This study examines how highly disruptive issues cause profound dissonance in societal members that are cognitively and emotionally invested in existing institutions. The authors use PETA’s (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) entrepreneurial advocacy for animal rights to show how this highly disruptive issue interrupted and violated taken-for-granted interpretations of institutions and institutional life. The authors compare 30 YouTube videos of PETA’s advocacy to explore pathways to effective sensegiving and sensemaking of highly disruptive issues. The findings augment the analytical synergy that exists between sensemaking and institutional analysis by unpacking the micro-level dynamics that may facilitate transformational institutional change.

This study explores how thinking infrastructures can orchestrate collective sensemaking in unstable and socially contested environments, such as large-scale humanitarian crises. In particular, drawing from recent interest in the role of artifacts and infrastructures in sensemaking processes, the study examines the evaluative underpinnings of prospective sensemaking as groups attempt to develop novel understandings about a desired but ambiguous set of future conditions. To explore these theoretical concerns, a detailed case study of the unfolding challenges of managing a large-scale humanitarian crisis response was conducted. This study offers two contributions. Firstly, it develops a theorization of the process through which performance evaluation systems can serve as thinking infrastructures in the collaborative development of new understandings in unstable environments. Secondly, this study sheds light on the practices that support prospective sensemaking through specific features of thinking infrastructures, and unpacks how prospective and retrospective forms of sensemaking may interact in such processes.

The purpose of this paper is to display and critically reflect upon how field experiences in the research process interacted with the author's subjectivity and shaped her construction of knowledge about organisational conflict.

Drawing on Weick's theoretical framework of sensemaking and the notion of reflexivity as a resource for dealing with research experiences, the paper presents empirical narratives that explore how research experiences of negotiating access to information and emic categories of conflict in the field, analysing events and morally deciding which stories from the field are conflict stories, and dealing with ethical dilemmas in the process of doing research about conflict constitute common factors that influenced the author's construction of knowledge about organisational conflict.

The paper shows that the way we organise and make sense of research experiences shapes our process of theorising and the actual production of knowledge in a research field.

We should document and display the process of theorising in our research and thoroughly pursue what we experienced in the field, because this will create thoroughness to our research and add to, not devalue, the knowledge we produce.

This paper highlights the process of theorising in organisational research. The empirical narratives presented in the paper contribute to the narrow display within the field of how we, as organisational researchers, mobilise our theorising and construct knowledge.