Madeline Ong

Offender Morality in the Aftermath of Wrongdoing

Recent calls for research have inspired a surge of theoretical and empirical work aimed at better understanding how to recover from unjust and unethical actions in organizations, with particular burgeoning interest in constructive and socially aware responses. However, the majority of this work has focused on the concerns of those who have suffered injustice/unfairness or the organizational decision makers responsible for resolving the conflict and repairing functional organizational relationships. Little work has examined the perspective of the moral agent who is actually responsible for the violation (i.e., the offender) or the implications of that offender’s motives for restorative action. This symposium brings together the latest research on offenders, their experiences in the aftermath of a wrongdoing, and their constructive motivations toward moral reform and organizational reintegration. By focusing on the underlying motivations of workplace offenders, the research presented in this symposium offer...

Advocating an Ethical Viewpoint: Speaking Up About Social and Ethical Issues in Organizations

In this symposium, we address critical questions around why and how individuals advocate for an ethical point of view in organizations to address social or ethical issues. In contrast to dominant decision making perspectives in the literature, the papers in this symposium emphasize the psychological, social and institutional processes that enable some organizational members to raise a social and ethical issue. The papers also address some of the tactics organizational members use to advocate for (or obstruct) an ethical point of view. Collectively, the four presentations in the symposium depart from the literature’s dominant theoretical perspective around the factors that allow individuals to succumb to ethical transgression. This focus on antisocial or deviant behavior calls attention to important misdeeds at work but obscures the work some organizational members engage in to advance an ethical point of view, something that represents a potentially more productive, proactive, and constructive response to...