Moral Selves: Organizational character and the pursuit of purpose

Abstract

What makes some organizations stay the course with their social and environmental commitments while others, in the face of political adversity and shifting stakeholder views, do not? In this paper, we argue that the answer to this question lies in capturing the differences in character between organizations and how their character shapes what organizations consider their moral obligations to be. Building on moral philosophy, we expand on the limited writings on organizational character in the literatures on CSR, business ethics and organizational theory. We use our expanded conceptualization to develop a theoretical typology of organizational characters and elaborate a process model that explains when and how an organization may shift in its moral reasoning and develop a different kind of character for itself. Theorizing organizations as agents with a moral character sheds light on the emergence of organizational purpose and offers implications for ongoing research on purpose, CSR, and ethics within organizational theory, research, and practice.