Transcript Document

Pedavena, 12 Giugno 2010
Bounded
Business
Ethics
Managerial Decisions
or
Organizational
Ethical Failures?
Sustainability Advisory
Services
Simone de Colle
University of Virginia
[email protected]
Bounded
Business
Ethics
My Research Approach
1. What are the sources of unethical behavior
within business organizations?
2. What is “unethical”?
3. What are the (organizational/societal)
consequences of (individual) ethical
failures? (btw: not only negative…)
4. What is a “Bounded Business Ethics”
approach to investigate these problems?
5. What can this approach tell us more about
the Heineken-Pedavena case?
2
3 of 6:
FOCUS OF MY
RESEARCH
Sources of unethical behavior
•
•
•
Kant/Mill/Aristotle
Gauthier (1982)
Rest (1986)
•
•
Issue-related (Jones, 1991)
Context-based (Trevino
1986; Buttlefield, Trevino &
Weaver, 2000)
Moral
Motivation
/Intent
FAILURE OF MOTIVATION
(weak/lack of)
Moral
Awareness
AWARENESS FAILURE
(lack of)
•
•
Werhane (1999)
Rorty (2007)
Moral
Imagination
•
•
Freeman (1994)
Harris and Freeman (2008)
Separation
Thesis
FAILURE OF IMAGINATION
(paucity of)
SEPARATION BIASES
(perpetuation of)
•
•
•
•
•
Kets De Vries (1980, 1984, 1991)
Messick and Bazerman (1996);
Messick (1999)
Reynolds (2006)
Milgram (1974)
Tenbrunsel & Smith Crowe ‘08
• Simon (1947)
• Dunfee & Donaldson (1994)
• Chugh, Bazerman, Banaji (2005)
Neurosis and
other psychological traps
PSYCHOLOGICAL FAILURES
(influence of)
Bounded
Rationality &
Ethicality
FAILURE OF BOUNDED
RATIONALITY/ETHICALITY
Organizational Ethical Failures
Bounded
Business
Ethics
Bounded
Business
Ethics
What is “ethical”?
 In their Academy of Management Annals review of
30 years of research on ethical decision-making,
Tenbrunsel and Smith-Crowe (2008: 547) states:
“In our review, it became readily apparent that one
notable void in the field was a definition of the
fundamental concept of “ethical”…
……without a universal understanding of the core
dependent variable, research will remain
inconsistent, incoherent and atheoretical”.
Bounded
Business
Ethics
From “unethical behavior” to
Organizational Ethical Failures
My tentative definition:
OEFs are decisions within business organizations that:
1)Involve unethical conduct in the decision-making process; and/or
2) Fail to continuously equilibrate in a fair and efficient way
stakeholder interests.
Organizational
Ethical
Failures
=
Unethical
Conduct
+
Stakeholder
Equilibration
Failures
Decisions that generate behavior that is
Decisions that fail to balance
“illegal or morally unacceptable to the
stakeholder competing claims in
larger community” (Jones, 1991) or
a fair and efficient way
violate “accepted moral norms of
(Venkataraman, 2002). 5
behavior” (Trevino et al. 2006
Bounded
Business
Ethics
More on OEFs
Organizational
Ethical
Failures
=
Unethical
Conduct
+
Stakeholder
Equilibration
Failures
Traditional Business Ethics research
• Type I: Unethical conduct is necessarily an ethical failure in the process of
decision making, but not necessarily an ethical failure in the outcomes;
• Type II: Stakeholder equilibration failures are necessarily ethical failures in
terms of the outcomes of the decision making process;
• Not every organizational failure is an ethical failure;
• On the other hand, every Type II OEF will generate, over time, a loss of
value for some stakeholders.
• Traditional Business Ethics research is focussing on “Type I OEFs”
(“Unethical Conduct”).
6
Bounded
Business
Ethics
From Traditional Business Ethics…
CLEAR
ETHICALLY
JUSTIFIABLE
DECISIONS
GRAY ZONE:
IS THIS ETHICAL?
CLEAR
UNETHICAL
CONDUCT
Separation
Thesis
Heineken/Pedavena
“Business decisions”
(as “Amoral Decisions”)
BOUNDED
BUSINESS
ETHICS:
ITS
EXPLANATORY
DOMAIN
…To Bounded Business Ethics
CLEAR
ETHICALLY
JUSTIFIABLE
DECISIONS
Heineken/Pedavena
GRAY ZONE:
IS THIS ETHICAL?
Organizational
Ethical Failures
CLEAR
UNETHICAL
CONDUCT
Bounded
Business
Ethics
Decision-Making
and Organizational Ethical Failures
Start of the
decision making
process
Ethical
Conduct
Unethical
Conduct
A MODEL
INTEGRATING
OEFs
(fair & efficient)
Stakeholder
Equilibration
Good
Organizational
performance
Organizational
Failure
(poor perf.)
Stakeholder
Equilibration
Failure
Type II
OEF
(outcomes)
(fair &
efficient)
Stakeholder
Equilibration
Type I
OEF
(process)
Stakeholder
Equilibration
Failure
Type III
OEF
(Process
+ outcomes)
There is no “amoral” decision: business and ethics are entangled
Bounded
Business
Ethics
The case of Heineken-Pedavena (1/2)
On September 22nd 2004 Heineken Italy decided to
close down the brewery of Pedavena, a small town in
the Italian Dolomites, by the 31st of December 2004,
and redistribute all beer production to the other 4
breweries owned by the Group in Italy. In the press
release, Heineken’s Board explained its decision by
pointing out that:
“…the strong competition by the other groups
operating in Italy and other companies exporting in this
country, require that Heineken strives for adequate
levels of efficiency in production, which the Pedavena
brewery is not able to provide because of its objective
limitations, despite the important contribution,
commitment and professionalism proven by the people
of the Pedavena factory”.
9
Bounded
Business
Ethics
The case of Heineken-Pedavena (2/2)
From the perspective of traditional business ethics it
does not seem to be a clear case of “unethical conduct”:
no ethical principle or moral standard seems to be
violated. However, if we look at it from the perspective of
Bounded Business Ethics, the following question
becomes relevant:
Is Heineken’s Italy decision to dismiss its brewery in
Pedavena an Organizational Ethical Failure?
 Research questions
1. Why did Heineken managers (initially) decide to close
the Pedavena brewery?
2. Why did the Pedavena workers reject the very
generous redundancy package?
3. Why did the civil society of Pedavena (and other
volunteers) decide to mobilize themselves to “save the
10
brewery”?
Bounded
Business
Ethics
Spazio ai protagonisti….
Qualche anno dopo….
11