Mapping moral philosophies: strategic implications for multinational firms

Abstract

Strategic managers appear increasingly under pressure from stakeholder concerns regarding social and ethical issues. Partially in response, the supply of ethical decision-making models has grown rapidly. Business ethics scholars have broadened their scope to incorporate moral philosophies into their research endeavors. Despite these positive trends, the international focus of business ethics research has been slow to evolve. Yet, diverse moral philosophies, often most apparent across international borders, have important strategic implications for multinational firms. The ethical norms pursued by cross-cultural alliance partners, distributors, suppliers, customers, financiers, and foreign government agencies can create public relations disasters, foster shareholder unrest, lead to consumer boycotts, and impact organizational outcomes. We seek to rectify the deficiency in international business ethics scholarship with two distinct contributions. First, we develop a new cross-cultural, macro-level model of societal ethics. Second, we map moral philosophies onto an established framework for assessing socioeconomic environments. These theoretical tools should assist managers of multinational organizations, international policy-makers, and researchers to recognize and prepare for the ethical consequences of international strategic decisions.

Which Ethics Will Make us Individually and Socially Happier? A Cross-Culture and Cross-Development Analytical Model

“…• An original analytical model is provided, where overall happiness (including rationality and freedom) is assumed to be measured over a common scale across cultures, but to depend on ethical approaches (including religion and social norms), which depend on cultural differences at country level: as in Robertson and Crittenden (2003), linkages between the macro-level dominant moral philosophy in use in different cultural/economic systems and the micro-level individual behaviour outcomes are stressed • An empirical test of the analytical model is offered (unlike Robertson and Crittenden, 2003), being aware that the complexity and variety of ethics would make it impossible to reach any conclusion on purely theoretical grounds, by introducing two reasonable additional assumptions: deficiency needs more important than growth needs for people in LDCs with respect to people in DCs; and aspiration levels are uniformly distributed between deficiency and growth needs for people in DCs, while condensed on deficiency needs for people in LDCs…”

“…A "by product" of this first purpose will be a ranking of ethical approaches in terms of individual happiness as dependent of individual characteristics. Next, there is a huge psychological, social and economic literature aiming at motivating (for recent examples, Pflug, 2008;Lu, 2001) or at assessing (for recent examples, Welsch, 2003;Peirò, 2006;Inglehart et al, 2008;Heylighen and Bernheim, 2000;Haller and Hadler, 2006;Veenhoven, 2005;Hayo, 2007;Lelkes, 2006) the observed differences in happiness contents in different countries or cultures, on the one hand; on the other hand, at justifying (for recent examples, Robertson and Crittenden, 2003;Gossling, 2003;Jensen, 2008) or at measuring (for recent examples, Brammer et al, 2006;Franke andNadler, 2008, Forsyth et al, 2008;Guiso et al, 2003;Cherry et al, 2003;Beekun et al, 2005;Ahmed et al 2003;Singhapakdi et al, 2001;Karande et al, 2000;Tavakoli et al, 2003;Vasquez et al 2001;Volkema & Fleury, 2002;Lu & Gilmour, 2004;Robertson et al 2002;Zabid and Ho, 2003;Zabid and Ibrahim, 2008;Kracher et al, 2002;Vittel and Patwardhan, 2008;Marta et al, 2001;Blodgood et al, 2008) the observed differences in ethical approaches prevailing in different countries or cultures. The second purpose of this paper is to apply the analytical model to explain the observed differences in happiness in different countries or cultures in terms of the observed different ethical approaches prevailing in different countries or cultures, under very plausible assumptions.…”

Perceptions of international strategic moves: Saudi Arabia versus the United States

“…Researchers have also found that a national tendency toward a certain economic ideology can have an effect on how managers perceive issues such as ethical dilemmas, strategic moves and international expansion (Begley & Tan, 2001;Ralston, Holt, Terpstra, & Kai-Cheng, Y., 1997;Robertson & Crittenden, 2003). Cultural traits and categories such as social status, proclivity for entrepreneurial behaviour and overarching work values have been found to vary between Anglo-Saxon/Western societies and Middle Eastern and Asian societies (Begley & Tan, 2001;Robertson et al, 2012).…”

Metodologije Za Etičko Odlučivanje U Socijalnom Radu

“…Ethical decision making has been subject to review and discussion in many other disciplines: business (Robertson and Crittenden, 2003;Craft, 2013), medicine (Bernard Lo, 2013; Ruiz-Cano et al, 2015) and psychology (Cottone and Claus, 2000), among others. In the case of social work, it is an issue that is gaining in importance, as given the aforementioned peculiarities of the profession, having models and methods to help with ethical decision making has become a pressing need that professionals are increasingly calling for (Úriz, 2004;Buck, Fletcher and Bradley, 2015).…”