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This paper aims to investigate whether anthropomorphized (i.e. humanized) brands are judged less negatively for competence failures than for moral lapses and how these ethical judgments impact negative word-of-mouth (NWOM) intentions of less-lonely and more-lonely consumers.

Two scenario-based experiments were conducted, involving a total of 1,375 US mechanical turk (Amazon consumer panel) participants.

Findings show that brand humanization has an impact on ethical judgments only for less-lonely consumers. More specifically, for less-lonely consumers, a humanizing strategy backfires when the failure is moral but helps the brand when the failure is competence-related. On the other hand, more-lonely consumers judge the situation less negatively overall, and this effect is not impacted by the anthropomorphization strategy. Process tests indicate that these judgments indirectly affect consumers’ intention to spread NWOM following negative events.

Future research could examine the specific process for lonely consumers (i.e. the role of empathy) and manipulate the size of the negative events (i.e. consumer perceptions of moderate vs extreme failures).

Brand managers need to consider their specific situations, as anthropomorphization can have both positive and negative effects depending on the consumers and the failure type (moral vs competence).

Extant research indicates that a humanizing strategy backfires when the market has negative information about the brand. This research introduces types of negative information, as well as consumers’ loneliness as moderators and contributes to the literature in branding, business ethics and word-of-mouth.

This chapter reviews the evidence of the development of ethical decision-making competencies of medical professionals. Selected studies are reviewed that use a theoretical framework that has shown the most promise for providing evidence of character formation. The evidence suggests that entering professionals lack full capacity for functional processes that give rise to morality (sensitivity, reasoning, motivation and commitment, character and competence). Further, following professional education, considerable variations in these abilities persist. Whereas many perceive that role modeling is the most effective way to teach professionalism, there is no empirical evidence to support the role of modeling in professional development. The chapter concludes with suggestions for facilitating character development resistant to influence by negative role models or adverse moral milieu.

Purpose: This chapter applies and integrates theories of status and stigma to better understand the mechanisms that drive the combined effects of the status of race and the stigma of criminal record in the context of the labor market. Using these social psychological theories of status and stigma, I propose and test two potential mechanisms – moral expectations and performance expectations – that might explain the compound or “double disadvantage” observed among Black job seekers with a criminal record. Within this synthetic application, I also seek to bridge and extend the literatures on status and stigma processes.

Methodology/Approach: To examine the relationship between race and criminal record and the potential mediating role of moral and performance expectations, I use a laboratory experiment consisting of a hiring scenario where participants evaluate mock, but ostensibly real job applicants who vary on the characteristics of interest. Participant evaluations consist of rankings along a series moral and performance-related scales as well as a set of workplace outcomes.

Findings: Findings suggest that race and criminal record aggregate to intensify disadvantage, with Black applicants who have a criminal record faring worse than other applicants on each workplace outcome. Results also support moral expectations, but not performance expectations, as a key mechanism driving this status-stigma intensification process.

Implications: This study has important implications for studies of race, crime, and employment as well as for theories of status and stigma. Future research should attend more closely to the role of perceived morality both in substantive work on race and criminal record and in bridging work on status and stigma processes. Pinpointing moral expectations as a mechanism of bias related to race and criminal record also opens new avenues for targeted intervention efforts.

The present article sets out to explore the ethical aspect of emotional competence used as both a personal and a collective resource in the occupational context of caring work. The data discussed in this article consists of interviews of and writings by Finnish social workers and nurses. By combining the concepts ‘emotional capital’ and ‘ethics of care’, this article concludes that the emotional competence of care workers manifests itself as the capability to use one's emotions in a way that enhances the ethical values of caring work and provides the employees with a sense of professional competence.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of the moral failure of a scandalized foreign brand afflicted with a product-harm crisis on competing brands (i.e. within the same product category) while taking into account the country of origin (COO) of the brands.

This paper presents the results of two studies. The first study uses an experimental design, while the second uses a survey to examine a real-life product-harm crisis.

The results indicate that the moral failure of a scandalized foreign brand has an indirect negative effect on the intention to purchase competing foreign brands from the COO of the scandalized foreign brand. This effect is, however, reversed for domestic brands, where moral failure has an indirect positive effect on the intention to purchase competing domestic brands.

The results of this research were based on an examination of how US consumers responded to the moral failure of Japanese and German brands. Future studies should examine brands from different COOs in different countries.

These results suggest that competing foreign brands from the COO of the scandalized brand should collaborate to quickly handle a product-harm crisis to prevent a spillover and that domestic competitors should capitalize on the opportunity to attract new customers.

This study represents a first attempt to examine the effect of a foreign brand’s moral failure in handling product-harm crisis on competing brands, both foreign and domestic.

Problems of competence grow out of institutional culture and from the way these institutions shape the profession and its members. Toward that end, this chapter is organized around three general considerations. First, we discuss some general issues about leader quality. Second, the present shape of the leadership corps in higher education will be discussed. Finally, we introduce several 21st century leadership core competencies (Brooks & Normore, 2009) for consideration to hiring personnel so they do not repeatedly select and promote unqualified leaders who stifle creativity and encourage conformity.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce practitioners to the appropriate use of measures of unethical behaviour, evaluate the use of integrity‐related assessments for use in personnel selection, and determine the validity of the moral competency index (MCI) instrument using standard validation procedures.

Content, construct, convergent and discriminant approaches are applied to establish the relative validity of the assessment tool.

The results of the MCI purport to align with one's moral values and behaviours. The paper establishes face validity of the MCI measure, but fails to establish an appropriate simple factor structure, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and support for the lack of impact of demographic factors on the purported measure of moral intelligence.

An acceptable but constrained (working students) sample was used in the validation.

Researchers and practitioners should be familiar with psychometric principles to ensure the use of valid tools in a predictive and defensible manner. New measures can be developed, but should be validated before being used for developmental or personnel decision‐making purposes.

This paper establishes the lack of validity associated with the MCI instrument; researchers and practitioners are exposed to considerations in the appropriate use of measures of unethical behaviour, and exposed to several previously validated integrity‐related assessments for use in personnel decision‐making.

Three aspects of teaching ethics are discussed. It deals with reflection, multicultural classrooms, and narrative. The first aspect acknowledges that trying to help people recognise moral issues and have the courage and capacity to respond is harder than teaching and examining theoretical learning. The second, whether we seek to develop a ‘new’ ethical framework that fits all situations and recognises the differing traditions of global classrooms and marketplaces or we acknowledge that there are different underlying values which are hard to reconcile. The third aspect, somewhat provocatively, is whether we would be better off using novels or TV series rather than textbooks for the teaching of ethics.

This study aims to examine the relationship between Achievement Motivation (AM), Smart Work (SW), and human resources (HR) performance. It questions how moral global leadership (MGL) could moderate the relationship between AM, SW, and HR performance. A theoretical model was developed and tested on sample data representing 219 employees, educators, and educational staff of Islamic Higher education (IHE). The data were collected through surveys and applied to structural equation modeling using SEM-PLS. This study found that AM and SW significantly affect HR performance. While MGL substantially moderates the relationship between AM, SW, and HR performance. This study contributes to the literature on MGL, AM, and SW in creating HR performance that has yet to be studied so far. This study offers the concept of MGL, which plays a central role in moderating the relationship between AM, SW, and HR performance.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the similarities and differences of occupational identity among logistics managers, controllers and specialists.

After a thorough review of the literature, the authors opted for desk research and content analysis of job advertisements for these three occupations as the major research method, focusing on a sample of 60 Polish and German advertisements.

The analysis of these data confirmed that the three occupations have their own identity (although there is a certain closeness between controllers and managers), but, from a holistic perspective of logistics management considering current trends in logistics, these three occupations should be integrated as a whole.

This has been the first paper comparing ads focused on logistics professionals in two relevant European economies in terms of logistics development: Poland and Germany.