Arie Reshef
Sir Harry Solomon School of Management- Western Galilee College, Israel
Arie Reshef is a Senior lecturer at the Sir Harry Solomon School of Management Western Galilee College, and at the Business Administration Department , University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. He is the editor of the "Study of The Organization and Human Resource Quarterly" published by the Center for the Study of Organizations and Human Resources Management. He teaches business ethics, psychology of moral behavior, organizational learning, human resources development and qualitative research methods. He has years of experience in the Israeli industry as vice president for organizational development and human resources development, and as human resources manager.
Ethical leadership has become in the last years a thriving research field (Frisch & Huppenbauer, 2014). The relevance of leaders ethicality has motivated ethical leadership theory (Skubbin & Herzog, 2016). Business leaders affect the moral capability and performance of organizations. True and effective leadership is that in which the leader’s behavior are consistent with ethical and moral values (Mendonca, 2001).However, business leaders face ethical issues that raise, deeply personal questions. They have to reconcile between the requirement of achieving and preserving managerial sucsess and between ethical demands of which they as ,responsible citizens and distinguished member of the community are, or ought to be aware. (Ulrich & Thielemann,1993; Badaracco,1997). According to Moreno (2011) business leaders are faced with ethical dilemmas on a daily basis as they balance their own ethics with the company's policies and practices. The moral balance model suggested by Nisan (Nisan,1995) offers a description of the principles underlying moral choice. Decisions concerning moral behavior (and judgments of other’s moral behavior) are affected by the perceived moral status of the actor and include some sort of quantitative weighing of the morally relevant actions performed by the actor in the recent past. Accordingly, a moral decision as to whether to allow oneself or another, to deviate from what is perceived as correct moral behavior, will be affected by one’s perception of actor’s moral balance.
The objectives of the current study were:
A. To explore, how do business leaders, reconcile between achieving managerial and economic success, with ethical demands and responsibilities in a competitive business environment.
B. To identify and describe values of care & compassion and emotions of business leaders in confronting real life ethical issues compared to their responses to hypothetical ethical issues
Findings:
In an open-ended semi-structured interview, 42 Israeli male CEOs (aged 40 to 65) were asked to describe two moral issues they had encountered during the current working year and to explain the reasons for the courses of action they chose to resolve those issues each interviewee was asked also to respond to two hypothetical workplace-oriented ethical dilemmas.
1. Content analysis of the interviews reveals decision stages and narratives that are both consistent with the propositions suggested by Nisan’s “moral balance model”. It was found that when making ethical evaluations and decisions, business managers take into account previously relevant behavior by considering their own level of ethical balance within a given time span.
2. A higher rate of emotional responses was discovered during the decision process of the reported real life issues compared to responses to the structured hypothetical dilemmas. The hypothetical workplace issues elicited less “care and compassion” reasoning responses (8%), compared to the frequency of “care and compassion” reasoning responses in the real-life issues (22.5%).
3. The findings indicate also that the ethical dimension of a decision is not necessarily visible to the decision maker which may behave unethically without being aware of it.
