Lindsey N. Godwin

Use of Balanced Experiential Inquiry to build ethical strength in the workplace

Purpose – Managers’ willingness to proceed with right action can be diminished by the need for approval and feeling the negative emotions that often accompany ethical challenges. This paper seeks to describe Balanced Experiential Inquiry (BEI), a learning activity designed to help managers develop sustained moral performance.Design/methodology/approach – Using their past experiences for reflective learning, managers engage in BEI to understand what promotes and curtails their ability to respond to ethical issues.Findings – A field study showed that managers engaging in BEI perceived less need for praise from others and experienced a reduction in negative emotions.Research limitations/implications – Future research evaluating BEI should use a control group, diverse sample, and a longitudinal design that tracks outcomes over time.Practical implications – Application of BEI is a promising mechanism to help organizations bolster managers’ internal desires to stay on an ethical decision‐making path.Originality...

Examining the Impact of Moral Imagination on Organizational Decision-Making

Emerging research suggests that an organization’s ability to sustain a competitive advantage is increasingly linked to its successful pursuit of a business strategy that generates mutual benefit where the business is both profitable and functional for the common good. The question remains, however: What are the attributes of decision makers that enable them to realize mutually beneficial outcomes? This dissertation argues that one critical key to solving this question is a better understanding of moral imagination in organizational decision making. To test this hypothesis, a new vignette-based cognitive measure for moral imagination in organizational decision making was created to explore empirically the relationship between moral imagination and mutually beneficial decision making. Overall, findings from 180 respondents supported the hypothesis that individuals, who exercise moral imagination, including the ability for discerning moral issues and developing a range of possible outcomes during the decision-making process, are indeed more likely to generate a mutually beneficial outcome for a situation compared to those who do not exercise moral imagination. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Motivating managers to develop their moral curiosity

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on an inward drive and commitment toward ethical discovery, which the authors refer to as the competency of moral curiosity. When directed toward moral decision making, the authors believe this ability can help managers effectively respond to their ethical challenges and contribute to an organizational environment that supports ethical performance. Design/methodology/approach – After presenting insights from the literature on curiosity and establishing its relevance, the authors describe a specific experiential learning tool designed to cultivate moral curiosity in organizational settings. The authors conduct a field study using this process to explore how moral curiosity can be strengthened through experiential practice. Findings – Results from the field study suggest that engagement in balanced experiential inquiry, a process that asks managers to reflect on their salient ethical dilemmas and then engage in both individual and collective meaning making, po...