The Skeptical Advocate: Acknowledging, Addressing, and Advancing Managerial Relevance in Behavioral Ethics Research


Speaker


Abstract

Current behavioral ethics research is generally amoral, leaving normative concerns for others to debate and thereby ignoring part of what it means to be “managerially relevant” in this domain. To reverse this trend, I suggest that scholars better acknowledge, address, and advance normative considerations in their research. To illustrate my approach, I develop a construct with a strong normative component, moral knowledge, and generate and test several hypotheses related to it. This general approach presents an ideal-type of business ethics scholar: not the objective scientist of other disciplines, but rather the skeptical advocate of our own management creeds.