The clean conscience at work: emotions, intuitions and morality

Abstract

How do people decide what is right and wrong, and to what extent are their actions guided by such moral considerations? Inspired by philosophical traditions, early approaches to morality focused on rationality, and assumed that people arrive at moral standards by logical thought. More recently, however, psychologists have explored the influence of emotions and intuitions on morality, and evidence has been accumulating that moral decisions and behaviors are far from rational, but instead, are guided by intuitions and situational considerations. For example, seemingly irrelevant concerns such as keeping one’s mind and spirit clean and pure can change people’s moral judgment. Emotions can also influence behavior, and positive, uplifting emotions such as elevation and gratitude can be harnessed to produce beneficial outcomes for individuals and organizations alike. Furthermore, people appear to aspire to an equilibrium of moral self-worth, and engage in more or less ethical behavior depending on their currently perceived moral integrity. Thus, morality and ethical behavior is less likely to reside in the person than in the context, and thus, for the study of spirituality, it might be beneficial to focus on people’s situational constraints in the workplace rather than their stable dispositions. Further, because of their potential to inspire positive action, organizations might aim to make positive moral emotions, such as gratitude, elevation, and awe part of everyday work contexts. Overall, in organizations and the workplace, the goal shifts from trying to identify the moral individual to providing the contextual conditions that appeal to spiritual concerns in order to foster moral behavior.

Moral emotions: A review and research agenda for management scholarship

“…Extant research has shown that gratitude encourages prosocial behaviors (i.e., Bartlett & DeSteno, ; Brief & Motowidlo, ; Emmons & McCullough, ; Ford, Wang, Jin, & Eisenberger, ; Grant & Gino, ; Michie, ; Spence, Brown, Keeping, & Lian, ) by increasing feelings of self‐worth (Grant & Gino, ). Additionally, being the source of gratitude may encourage people to pay it forward by engaging in prosocial behaviors towards multiple parties (e.g., Halali, Kogut, & Ritov, ; Schnall & Cannon, ; Spence, Brown, Keeping, & Lian, ) and refraining from destructive behaviors (e.g., Baron, ; Ford, Wang, Jin, & Eisenberger, ). Research also suggests that employees who experience gratitude care about CSR initiatives (Andersson, Giacalone, & Jurkiewicz, ), have high job satisfaction (Lanham, Rye, Rimsky, & Weill, ; Waters, ), enhanced loyalty (Osborne, Smith, & Huo, ), and less burnout on the job (Chan, ; Lanham, Rye, Rimsky, & Weill, ).…”

“…Furthermore, elevation has been found to be distinct from basic emotions (e.g., happiness; Romani & Grappi, ; Vianello, Galliani, & Haidt, ) and general positive affect (Schnall, Roper, & Fessler, ; Vianello, Galliani, & Haidt, ). Yet Haidt () suggested that elevation and awe, which occur when people transcend their humanness and feel connected with nature and/or a higher calling (Fagley & Adler, ; Keltner & Haidt, ; Schnall & Cannon, ), may share conceptual space. Thus, research is needed to properly differentiate these two constructs.…”

Moral Elevation and Moral Beauty: A Review of the Empirical Literature

“…Second, elevation-inducing strategies could become effective organizational interventions for starting positive change and for promoting moral behavior throughout an organization (Schnall & Cannon, 2012). For example, in one study it was found that when leaders showed self-sacrifice for the organization and demonstrated fair behavior toward employees, this resulted in feelings of moral elevation in their subordinates, which in turn led to greater affective commitment to the organization and to more organizational citizenship behavior of the subordinates (Vianello, Galliani, & Haidt, 2010).…”

Exploring self-reflection in dual relationship decision-making

“…Self-reflection, seen as 'a process of self-analysis, self-evaluation, self-dialogue and self-observation' (Yip, 2006, p. 777), in social work decision-making has been widely endorsed (Davidson, 2005;O'Sullivan, 2010) and considered a core competency for social workers (Chu, Tsui, & Yan, 2009). The centrality of self-reflection to practice could easily foster the assumption that practitioners and supervisors engage in this process when managing boundary issues, but preliminary evidence, based on a range of ethical dilemmas, suggests that many social workers rely on intuition to make ethical decisions (Asquith & Cheers, 2001;O'Sullivan, 2010;Schnall & Cannon, 2012). The implication is that if social workers often rely on intuition, it is not clear how systematically decisionmaking is approached; what role self-reflection plays in the process; or how vulnerable the decision-making is to conflicting interests, biases, and personal beliefs.…”