The Link Between Ethical Judgment and Action in Organizations: A Moral Approbation Approach

Existing models of ethical decision making cannot yet explain the disparity between what organization members decide is “right” to do in a given situation and what they actually do. The current paper advances these models with the development of a new idea called moral approbation , defined as moral approval from oneself or others. By arguing that people rely on the opinions of their referent groups when deciding how to behave, the paper also explains how organizational or environmental factors can affect individuals' ethical behavior.This theory proposes that individuals consider four factors when determining their own or someone else's level of moral responsibility in a given situation: the severity of the act's consequences, the certainty that the act is moral or immoral, the actor's degree of complicity in the act, and the extent of pressure the actor feels to behave unethically.A moral agent in an organizational predicament uses these four factors to determine the level of moral responsibility that his or her referent group will attribute to him or her. Based on that perceived level of responsibility, he or she will plan a certain course of action and estimate how much moral approbation can be expected from that referent group based on that behavior. The agent then compares this anticipated level of moral approbation to the minimum that he or she can tolerate. If the anticipated moral approbation meets that threshold, the agent is likely to establish a formal intention of behaving according to the projected plan, and is more likely to act in accordance with that plan. On the other hand, if the comparison shows that the threshold will not be met, the actor is likely to rethink his or her course of action and continue to go through the moral approbation process until a plan is developed that will lead to the necessary level of approbation.The moral approbation model begins to fill the theoretical gap between moral judgment and moral action in organizations, with some explicit observations about the effect of organizational influences. These issues are of both scholarly interest and practical concern.