Managers as Moral Leaders: Moral Identity Processes in the Context of Work

Abstract

This qualitative study explores how business leaders narrate their personal ways of recognizing, reasoning, and resolving moral conficts and what these stories reveal about their moral identity processes within organizational contexts. Based on interviews with 25 business leaders, 4 moral identity statuses were identifed: achievement (commitment to a personally meaningful moral value framework that had been established through a period of self-exploration), moratorium (selfexploration of one’s moral value framework that was ongoing), foreclosure (commitment to a given moral value framework that was present with little or no personal self-exploration), and difusion (neither clear commitment to nor exploration of a personal moral value framework was present). The moral identity statuses were based on how leaders approached and interpreted moral conficts and what the infuence of the organizational context was in their moral decision-making processes. Some remained steadfast in adhering to their previous value commitments, while others tried to avoid taking any clear moral standpoint. Still others experienced moral conficts as disequilibrating events that triggered refective processes and developmental cycles of moral identity change. These moral identity statuses hold implications for facilitating moral identity development among business leaders in the context of work.