Moral sensitivity in business: A revised measure

Abstract

In order to manage ethical challenges in organizations and the workplace, moral sensitivity (MS)—the ability to identify and ascribe importance to moral issues when they arise in the workplace—is seen as the key prerequisite by researchers and professionals. However, despite the importance of MS, satisfactory reliable and valid measures to assess this competence are to date lacking. The present research tests the psychometric qualities of a revised MS measure for the business domain (R-MSB) that is designed to assess individual differences in moral and business-related value sensitivity. We present three different analyses with two heterogeneous samples of Swiss and German employees (total N = 1168). The first two studies provide good evidence of the measures’ factorial structure, its construct, and criteria-related validity. The third study examines how affective and empathic responses are associated with MS and business sensitivity (BS). The results support the view that empathic responsiveness enhances MS. The instrument’s theoretical and practical strengths, limitations, and avenues for future research are discussed.

Educating moral sensitivity in business: An experimental study to evaluate the effectiveness of a serious moral game

“…Furthermore, MS can also benefit from empathic concerns, including perspective-taking skills (Davis, 1980;Eisenberg & Fabes, 1990;Hoffman, 2000), as they enable an individual to be responsive to the needs of others and to understand the situation from different perspectives (Narvaez, 2010;Tanner & Christen, 2014;Tenbrunsel & Smith-Crowe, 2008). Indeed, a recent study has provided empirical evidence that a sense of caring and relational connection to others (i.e., empathic concerns) is especially likely to facilitate MS (Schmocker, Tanner, Katsarov, & Christen, 2021). In line with these claims, our design will also assess potential changes in affective responses and empathic concerns through playing when testing the effectiveness of our game to improve MS (for the sake of simplicity, we will subsume affective and empathic responses under the term MS-related constructs).…”

“…Importantly, to examine whether playing the SMG helped to improve MS, we do not build on self-reports but instead, draw on two measures separately assessed. First, we rely on a rigorously tested and validated measure of business-related MS (Schmocker et al, 2019, Schmocker et al, 2021 that was administered prior to and after playing the games. To tackle test-retest effects that may be likely when individuals are faced with the same measure twice in the pre-and post-test phases, we created two parallel blocks of questions (split-half methodology).…”

“…Moral sensitivity. To assess this variable, we adopted the approach by Schmocker et al (2021). Participants were provided with four vignettes, each describing an ethical problem within a fictitious company.…”

“…The average score of those four statements (across all vignettes) was used to assess MS (α = 0.71). Past research has demonstrated good evidence of measure's reliability and validity (for a detailed description, see Schmocker et al, 2021).…”

“…Empathic concern and affective responses. Again drawing on Schmocker et al (2021), two additional scales were provided after each vignette. To assess empathic concern, we used three items from the German Saarbrucken Personality Questionnaire (Paulus, 2009), which were adapted to the content of the vignette.…”