From Intrapsychic Moral Awareness to the Role of Social Disruptions, Labeling, and Actions in the Emergence of Moral Issues

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate and extend a sensemaking view of how ethics issues emerge in and around organizations. Current research in ethical decision making relies predominantly on a definition of ethics that distinguishes moral decision-making processes from amoral or non-moral decision-making processes through the intrapsychic use of explicit moral concepts. I recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the current approach and propose a model which builds on previous empirical work to explain how morality emerges in organizations through social interaction. This sensemaking model illustrates the role of disruptions, labeling, and action in the emergence of moral issues, and recasts the emergence of ethical issues, not as the individual recognition of objective moral content, but as more or less reliable interrelating. The model developed in this paper contributes to theory about ethical decision making by: (1) moving beyond the categorization of construals as moral or amoral to examining the similarities and differences across construals and the effects of this overlap for joint action; (2) reinstating the role of action and its interpretation in the story of how moral issues emerge; (3) redescribing ethics as more or less reliable interrelating, which broadens the toolkit for improving organizational conduct; and finally, (4) highlighting how every decision frame has the potential to create a moral issue in interaction.

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