The impact of authoritarian leadership on ethical voice in police
In a sample of 522 police officers and staff in an English police force, the authors investigated the role of authoritarian leadership in reducing the levels of employee ethical voice (i.e., employees discussing and speaking out opinions against unethical issues in the workplace).

Drawing upon uncertainty management theory, the authors found that authoritarian leadership was negatively related to employee ethical voice through increased levels of felt uncertainty, when the effects of a motivational-based mechanism suggested by previous studies were controlled. In addition, the authors found that the negative relationship between authoritarian leadership and employee ethical voice via felt uncertainty is mitigated by higher levels of benevolent leadership. That is, when authoritarian leaders simultaneously exhibit benevolence, they are less likely to cause feelings of uncertainty in their followers who are then more likely to speak up about unethical issues.

The authors discuss theoretical and practical implications of the findings.

Yuyan Zheng, Les Graham, Jiing-Lih Farh & Xu Huang. 2021. The Impact of Authoritarian Leadership on Ethical Voice: A Moderated Mediation Model of Felt Uncertainty and Leader Benevolence.

Mindfulness and habitus in educating wise leaders
This article brings together mindfulness and habitus theory in relation to developing wise leaders. In particular, the authors present new insights about the intersection of time, subjective and intersubjective experience, and mindfulness that are relevant to developing embodied wisdom in leaders.

The authors show that temporal competence is essential for shaping habitus and developing embodied wisdom. Further, and to extend theoretical understandings of mindfulness in leadership, the authors argue that temporal capabilities developed through mindfulness can foster embodied wisdom by creating a specific ‘wisdom habitus’ that includes values and ethics. The system of dispositions that comprise one’s habitus is, however, largely unconscious and implicit and the authors discuss how mindfulness renders habitus, including ethical conation accessible to development for the bodily ability to act wisely.

This article then establishes a framework that leadership development programs in business schools can adopt for understanding habitus and mindfulness to enable embodied wisdom to develop in leaders. Finally, the authors show that a mindfulness perspective offers valuable contributions to research on leadership.

David Rooney, Wendelin Küpers, David Pauleen & Ekatarina Zhuravleva. 2021. A Developmental Model for Educating Wise Leaders: The Role of Mindfulness and Habitus in Creating Time for Embodying Wisdom.

How does leader and employee humility influence employee citizenship and deviance behaviours?
Various studies have recognised the importance of humility as a foundational aspect of virtuous leadership and have revealed the beneficial effects of leader humility on employee moral attitudes and behaviours.

However, these findings may overestimate the benefits of leader humility and overlook its potential costs. Integrating person–supervisor fit theory and balance theory with the humility literature, the authors employ a dyadic approach to consider supervisor and employee humility simultaneously.

The authors investigate whether and how the (in)congruence of supervisor and employee humility influences employee citizenship and deviance behaviours. The authors conducted a multilevel, multiphase, and multisource field study to test their hypotheses. The results of cross-level polynomial regression analyses revealed that when supervisors and employees were incongruent in humility, employees experienced higher levels of negative affect toward supervisors. Also, compared to those in low–low congruent dyads, employee negative affect toward supervisors was lower in high–high congruent dyads.

The results further revealed asymmetric incongruence effects: employees experienced the highest levels of negative affect toward supervisors when their own humility was lower than their supervisors’. In addition, the authors found that employee negative affect toward supervisors mediated the impacts of supervisor–employee (in)congruence in humility on employee organisational citizenship behaviour and counterproductive work behaviour.

Xin Qin, Xin Liu, Jacob A. Brown, Xiaoming Zheng & Bradley P. Owens. 2021. Humility Harmonized? Exploring Whether and How Leader and Employee Humility (In)Congruence Influences Employee Citizenship and Deviance Behaviors.

Supervisors’ values and ethics: A cross-national study
In this study, the authors used the framework of institutional anomie theory (Messner and Rosenfeld in Crime and the American dream, Wadsworth, Delmont, CA, 2001; Rosenfeld and Messner in: Passas and Agnew (eds) The future of anomie theory, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1997) to examine the relationship between supervisors’ ethics and their personal value orientation, including achievement and pecuniary materialism.

The authors further investigated whether these individual-level associations were moderated by societal factors consisting of income inequality, government efficiency, foreign competition, and technological advancement. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to analyze data of 16,464 supervisors from 42 nations obtained from the 2010–2014 wave of the World Values Survey.

Results showed that strong achievement value orientation was positively related to willingness to justify ethically suspect behaviours; government efficiency and technological advancement, respectively, had negative and positive moderating effects on this relationship. On the other hand, foreign competition had a positive moderating effect on the association between pecuniary materialism and ethicality.

Chung-wen Chen, Hsiu-Huei Yu, Kristine Velasquez Tuliao, Aditya Simha & Yi-Ying Chang. 2021. Supervisors’ Value Orientations and Ethics: A Cross-National Analysis.

Values and why some stories are sacred in organisations
How and why could some stories be construed as sacred in organisations, and what functions does the sacred have in organisational values work? Research has shown how values can be made formative of a range of organisational purposes and forms but has underscored their performative, situated, and agentic nature.

The authors address that void by studying the sacred as a potentially salient yet under-researched realm of values work. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of a faith-based health care organisation and the ethical philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, the authors describe how the sacred is figured in two sets of tales that were lived and told with surprising intensity and consistency: the parable of the Good Samaritan and the tale of the legacy bestowed by the organisation’s founder.

The authors theorise how this figuring of the sacred in story and in action recasts values work from a centralised and unitary process to a two-way learning dialectic between the ongoing creative imitation of action and narrative. Values in the shape of stories of the sacred do not achieve their meaning as unchangeable cores or sanctioned beliefs. Rather, they come to life in a process of ongoing moral inquiry that co-evolves with moral agencies. In the latter regard, the sacred primarily becomes manifest in everyday work in the form of questioning and creative acts of care. People become moral agents when they feel and respond to the sacred in the call of the other.

Gry Espedal & Arne Carlsen. 2021. Don’t Pass Them By: Figuring the Sacred in Organizational Values Work.

Engaged Buddhism and skillful managerial approaches
As a transitional economy, Vietnam has undergone tremendous changes over recent decades within a ‘fusion’ context that blends both traditional and modern values from its complex history. However, few studies have explored how contemporary issues in the context of Vietnam have brought both obstacles and skillful initiatives to managerial approaches to doing business.

The authors draw on the concepts of social trust and institutional theory to explore how informal institutions such as religious forces can contribute to the development of individual trust and whether individuals are willing to extend trust beyond familial networks. The authors contribute to the notion of a moral conception of trust by exploring how Buddhism in particular has initiated distinctive managerial approaches in the context of Vietnam, in response to dilemmas of social trust.

The findings highlight that as an informal institution, engaged Buddhism yields significant impact on the formation of social trust. The authors carried out in-depth interviews in Vietnam with 33 organisational leaders who were Buddhist practitioners, using thematic analysis to elucidate the findings and arguments.

The study reveals how the incorporation of Buddhist principles has fostered context-sensitive, non-extreme, and reflexive managerial approaches to enhance morality as a response to social trust issues.

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Mai Chi Vu & Trang Tran. 2021. Trust Issues and Engaged Buddhism: The Triggers for Skillful Managerial Approaches.

Character-based judgement in the professional practice
Dimensions of character are often overlooked in professional practice at the expense of the development of technical competence and operational efficiency. Drawing on philosophical accounts of virtue ethics and positive psychology, the present work attempts to elevate the role of ‘good’ character in the professional domain.

A ‘good’ professional is ideally one that exemplifies dimensions of character informed by sound judgement. A total of 2340 professionals, from five discrete professions, were profiled based on their valuation of qualities pertaining to character and judgement. Profile differences were subsequently examined in the self-reported experience of professional purpose towards a wider societal ‘good’.

Analysis of covariance, controlling for stage of career, revealed that professionals valuing character reported higher professional purpose than those overweighting the importance of judgement or valuing neither character nor judgement, F(3, 2054) = 7.92, p < .001. No differences were found between the two groups valuing character, irrespective of whether judgement was valued simultaneously.

This profiling analysis of entry-level and in-service professionals, based on their holistic character composition, paves the way for fresh philosophical discussion regarding what constitutes a ‘good’ professional and the interplay between character and judgement. The empirical findings may be of substantive value in helping to recognise how the dimensions of character and judgement may impact upon practitioners’ professional purpose.

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J James Arthur, Stephen R. Earl, Aidan P. Thompson & Joseph W. Ward. 2021. The Value of Character-Based Judgement in the Professional Domain.

Values and power distance in sustainable consumption
As human consumption is one of the key contributors to environmental problems, it is increasingly urgent to promote sustainable consumption. Drawing on the agentic-communal model of power, this research explores how the psychological feeling of power influences consumers’ preference for green products.

The authors show that low power increases consumers’ preference for green (vs. conventional) products compared to high power (Studies 1a and 1b). Importantly, the authors identify two factors moderating the main effect of power on green consumption. Specifically, the authors find that the effect of power on green consumption is more salient among those with high green consumption values (Study 2). In addition, the effects of power are dynamic as a function of power distance belief (PDB), such that low power (vs. high power) promotes green consumption in the low-PDB context while high power (vs. low power) promotes green consumption in the high-PDB context (Study 3).

Taken together, these findings provide novel insights into understanding green consumption from the perspectives of social power, green values, and PDB. Besides contributing to the literature, the findings have significant implications for marketers and policy-makers in promoting green campaigns, bridging the attitude-behaviour gap, and building a more sustainable society.

Li Yan, Hean Tat Keh & Xiaoyu Wang. 2021. Powering Sustainable Consumption: The Roles of Green Consumption Values and Power Distance Belief.

Emotional exhaustion and ethical behaviour and performance in salespersons
Recent events and popularised stereotypes call into question the ethics of salesperson behaviours. Although prior research demonstrates that salespeople’s emotional exhaustion can have negative consequences for several job outcomes, little is known about the factors that can mitigate such relationships—particularly the relationship between emotional exhaustion and ethical behaviour.

To remedy this knowledge gap, the authors draw from self-control theory to propose a novel theoretical framework and develop hypotheses. These hypotheses are tested on a unique dataset consisting of survey data collected from 123 matched business-to-business (B2B) salesperson–manager dyads. The findings reveal that (1) emotional exhaustion is negatively associated with sales performance, (2) emotional exhaustion is negatively associated with ethical behaviours, (3) ethical behaviours are positively associated with sales performance, (4) ethical behaviours mediate emotional exhaustion’s negative effect on sales performance, (5) perceived supervisor support attenuates the negative association between emotional exhaustion and ethical behaviours, and (6) contrary to expectations, grit strengthens the negative association between emotional exhaustion and ethical behaviours.

As the authors show here, perceived supervisor support may attenuate the undesirable effects of emotional exhaustion on ethical behaviours and sales performance. The article’s broader contribution thus lies in its suggestion that managers pay special attention to these factors.

Moreover, factors such as grit can have unexpected and undesirable influences; therefore, the authors draw attention to the importance of scrutinising these interactions, even when the factors involved are almost universally touted as beneficial. Theoretical and practical implications of the research are discussed.

Bruno Lussier, Nathaniel N. Hartmann & Willy Bolander. 2021. Curbing the Undesirable Effects of Emotional Exhaustion on Ethical Behaviors and Performance: A Salesperson–Manager Dyadic Approach.

Abusive supervision: Third parties’ Schadenfreude and work engagement
Abusive supervision negatively affects its direct victims. However, recent studies have begun to explore how abusive supervision affects third parties (peer abusive supervision).

The authors use the emotion-based process model of schadenfreude as a basis to suggest that third parties will experience schadenfreude and increase their work engagement as a response to peer abusive supervision (PAS). Furthermore, the authors suggest that the context of competitive goal interdependence facilitates the indirect relationship between PAS and third parties’ work engagement on schadenfreude.

The authors use a mixed-method approach to test the hypotheses. Data from an experimental study conducted by facial expression analysis technology (Study 1, a 2 × 2 design, N = 104) and a multi‐wave field study (Study 2, N = 229) generally support the hypotheses. Overall, the study extends PAS literature and meaningfully informs practitioners who aim to promote ethical workplace environments.

Yueqiao Qiao, Zhe Zhang & Ming Jia. 2021. Their Pain, Our Pleasure: How and When Peer Abusive Supervision Leads to Third Parties’ Schadenfreude and Work Engagement.

Mindfulness and ethical behaviours
While prior research suggests a link between mindfulness and ethical decision-making, most of the evidence for this link is correlational and refers to self-focused ethical behaviours. The paucity of experimental evidence, coupled with a lack of clarity on what mechanisms underlie the effect, limits our understanding of whether and how mindfulness might foster other-focused ethical behaviours.

In this research, the authors hypothesise that state mindfulness might promote other-focused ethical behaviours by increasing resourcefulness, which the authors define as a perceived state of resource abundance. Across four experimental studies, the authors report causal evidence for the effects of state mindfulness instantiated through brief mindful meditation exercises on other-focused ethical behaviours, including choice of fair-trade products (Study 1A), charitable giving (Study 1B), and volunteering (Study 1C and Study 2). Resourcefulness mediates the effects of mindfulness on other-focused ethical behaviours (Study 2). This work answers the call for more experimental research on mindfulness and its important implications for ethical decision-making.

Davide C. Orazi, Jiemiao Chen & Eugene Y. Chan. 2021. To Erect Temples to Virtue: Effects of State Mindfulness on Other-Focused Ethical Behaviors.

Managing business model innovation to create value for all stakeholders
Managers and designers of innovative business models that are enabled by emerging technologies need to build legitimacy with ecosystem participants. Yet increasing legitimacy within the ecosystem raises competitors’ incentives to imitate the business model innovators, thereby adversely affecting the innovators’ ability to appropriate value.

The authors refer to this trade-off as the appropriation dilemma. The authors draw on institutional and resource-based perspectives to develop propositions about mitigating the appropriation dilemma and provide illustrations with a range of cases.

This theory development contributes to the technology management and business model innovation literatures by delineating how business model innovators can create value for all stakeholders and at the same time appropriate value through strategic business model design, a task that is particularly salient in the context of emerging technologies. The authors also strengthen the theoretical foundations of business model innovation research by grounding propositions about the strategic design of business models in resource-based theory and institutional theory.

Yuliya Snihur, Christoph Zott and Raphael (Raffi) Amit. 2021. Managing the Value Appropriation Dilemma in Business Model Innovation.

Profiting from enabling technologies across different domains
How to profit from innovation has been an important question for both innovation scholars and practitioners over the years. It is certainly a relevant question for all types of technological innovation, including emerging ones.

David J. Teece’s profiting from innovation (PFI) framework [Teece DJ (1986) Profiting from technological innovation: Implications for integration, collaboration, licensing and public policy. Res. Policy 15(6):285–305.] sets forth a theory of the relevant contingencies. However, Teece’s framework focuses on technologies with applications in specific domains. The authors focus on the question of how to profit from enabling technologies: technologies that are applicable across multiple domains.

The authors argue that capturing value in such circumstances is fundamentally different from profiting from less-enabling technologies and raises new issues with respect to the relevant business models and public policies. This paper’s contribution is threefold. It formally revises and extends the original PFI framework to include the case of enabling technologies, it provides empirical evidence to support the distinction between profiting from enabling and profiting from narrower “discrete” technologies, and it generates perspectives on the appropriate business models for these technologies and discusses related public policy implications, in light of the fact that the share of the benefits the innovator can capture is likely to be even smaller for enabling than for discrete technologies.

Alfonso Gambardella, Sohvi Heaton, Elena Novelli and David J. Teece. 2021. Profiting from Enabling Technologies?

Technology’s value creation: Emerging, enabling, embedding
Technology has been conceptualised in many ways, ranging from scientific and engineering knowledge to business enterprise “production functions” to physical artifacts that fulfill a particular purpose. These different conceptualisations underscore technology as a multifaceted construct that encompasses production know-how, problem solving, and functionality.

Although new technologies present significant opportunities for value creation, the realisation of those opportunities varies across firms, industries, and technologies over time. An understanding of the sources of this variation can help firms with their strategic decision making and offer guidance to policy makers on how they can facilitate technological progress to help spur economic growth. It requires recognising the important distinction between invention and innovation that goes back to Schumpeter (1934). Whereas inventions represent scientific discoveries that encompass new knowledge within a technological domain, innovation represents the subsequent commercialisation of those inventions so as to create value—and, hopefully, capture some of it as well.

Therefore, situating the technology in its commercialisation context and identifying the features that can have a significant impact on its value creation are pivotal to understanding how firms and policy makers can contribute to technological progress and generate superior performance.

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Rahul Kapoor and David J. Teece. 2021. Three Faces of Technology’s Value Creation: Emerging, Enabling, Embedding.

Enabling technologies and the role of private firms
Investments in enabling technologies—including the fifth-generation technology standard for broadband cellular networks (5G), artificial intelligence (AI), and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) technology—are important strategic decisions for firms.

This paper asks how inventions that private firms developed with (versus without) public-sector partners differ in their enabling technology trajectory. Using a novel method of machine learning matching, the authors compare patented technologies generated from more than 30,000 public–private relationships with comparable technologies invented by private firms alone during a 21-year period.

To measure the enabling potential of a technology, the authors introduce a new enabling technology index. The findings show that private-firm relationships with the public sector—in particular cooperative agreements and grants with mission agencies (National Aeronautics and Space Administration and Department of Defense)—are likely starting points for enabling technology trajectories. The authors thus put a spotlight on organisational arrangements that combine the breadth of exploration (agreements, grants) with deep exploitation in a particular domain (mission agency). A key contribution is a better understanding of the types of private-firm efforts that are associated with enabling technologies.

The authors also challenge the common assumption that enabling technologies have their origins only in public-sector projects and show how private firms are involved. This paper’s significant contribution is to show how private firms can change evolution of ecosystems through technology development.

Jason M. Rathje and Riitta Katila. 2021. Enabling Technologies and the Role of Private Firms: A Machine Learning Matching Analysis.

Choosing technology in start-ups
A central premise of research in the strategic management of innovation is that start-ups are able to leverage emerging technological trajectories as a source of competitive advantage. But, if the potential for a technology is given by the fundamental character of a given technological trajectory, then why does entrepreneurial strategy matter? Or, put another way, if the evolution of technology is largely shaped by the strategic choices entrepreneurs make, then why do technological trajectories exhibit systematic patterns such as the technology S-curve?

Taking a choice-based perspective, this paper illuminates the choices confronting a start-up choosing their technology by resolving the paradox of the technology S-curve through a reformulation of the foundations of the technology S-curve. Specifically, the authors reconceptualise the technology S-curve not as a technological given but as an envelope of potential outcomes reflecting differing strategic choices by the entrepreneur in exploration versus exploitation.

Taking this lens, the authors are able to clarify the role of technological uncertainty on start-up strategy, the impact of constraints on technological evolution, and how technology choice is shaped by the possibility of imitation. The findings suggest that staged exploration may stall innovation as a result of the replacement effect, increasing the strategic importance of commitment.

Joshua S. Gans, Michael Kearney, Erin L. Scott and Scott Stern. 2021. Choosing Technology: An Entrepreneurial Strategy Approach.

Using increasing abstraction to accelerate adoption of complex technologies
Many new technologies are complex and embody high levels of technical sophistication, and applying them should require significant knowledge and experience. Yet, the rapid adoption and incorporation of these technologies into other innovations seems inconsistent with the expertise needed to make them work.

In this paper, the authors propose increasing levels of abstraction as a strategy for speeding the adoption of new technologies. Higher-level abstractions package complexity in ways that makes them easier to understand and recombine, and they decrease the resources needed by firms to deploy sophisticated technical know-how. Increasing the level of abstraction is a way to push forward the innovative frontier by making such difficult-to-use technologies readily accessible to other innovators.

Although this framing has been used in engineering and software development to describe modular encapsulation and cumulative innovation, the authors propose its use in the management literature to describe more broadly the uptake of new technologies and their facile recombination. This framing casts a different light on cumulative innovation and exposes new managerial questions to explore.

Willy C. Shih. 2021. Increasing the Level of Abstraction as a Strategy for Accelerating the Adoption of Complex Technologies.

Managing uncertainty surrounding emerging technologies
Emerging technologies, while offering enormous potential for economic growth, carry a high degree of uncertainty regarding whether and when that potential may be realised. How can firms evaluate the uncertainty surrounding an emerging technology?

To address this question, the authors offer a structured approach that unbundles the uncertainty surrounding emerging technologies, incorporating both supply- and demand-side factors. These include the focal technology itself, the potential market applications, the users adopting the technology, the ecosystem of activities that support the technology’s value creation, and the business model with which the technology is being commercialised. The authors further consider that the uncertainty surrounding each of these sources may not be resolved in a vacuum, but, rather, that it may interact with other sources of uncertainty in a pooled, sequential, or reciprocal way.

Such a structured approach of evaluating uncertainty can help firms and managers in terms of the cognitive processes and the managerial practices and provide micro-foundations for dynamic managerial capabilities. The authors illustrate the applicability of the framework for two emerging technologies—gene therapy and autonomous vehicles—and how the framework can be integrated with prominent managerial practices for managing uncertainty.

Rahul Kapoor and Thomas Klueter. 2021. Unbundling and Managing Uncertainty Surrounding Emerging Technologies.

Paths of corporate irresponsibility
In this qualitative meta-analysis, the author analyses corporate irresponsibility as an emergent organisational process. Organisations enacting irresponsible practices rely not only on a particular form of a process path, but on how this process path evolves within the organisation.

To achieve a better understanding of this process path, the author conducted a qualitative meta-analysis drawn from 20 published cases of irresponsible organisations. The author explores how and under which conditions irresponsible behaviour of organisations arises, develops, and changes over time. The process path of corporate irresponsibility relies on the interaction of multiple levels of analysis and its temporal occurrence, resulting in either path dependency or path creation. Based on the empirical findings of the evolving phenomena, this study focuses on three phases of corporate irresponsibility: institutionalisation, problematisation, and adaptation.

The process of corporate irresponsibility can take two distinct paths, the reactive (organisations becoming locked-in in the path of corporate irresponsibility), and the proactive (organisations radically changing and breaking their path of corporate irresponsibility).

This study contributes to the corporate irresponsibility literature by offering new insights into, first, a processual and more interactional approach to corporate irresponsibility that accounts for interdependencies on the different levels of each phase, and second, the self-reinforcing mechanisms and explanatory patterns of corporate irresponsibility leading to path dependency or path creation.

Jill A. Küberling-Jost. 2021. Paths of Corporate Irresponsibility: A Dynamic Process.

To blow or not to blow the whistle?
Whistleblowers who need to decide whether or not they should report wrongdoing usually experience several anxieties and pressures before making a final decision. As whistleblowers continue to attract the attention of a wide range of stakeholders, more research is necessary to understand the effects of the perceived seriousness of threats (PST) and perceived seriousness of wrongdoing (PSW), as well as the effect of the rationalisation process on the intention to blow the whistle.

The authors make the original proposal that the rationalisation process can affect how PST and PSW trigger whistleblowing intentions. The authors tested their model using employees of tax offices operating in an emerging economy.

The authors suggest several research findings, which can be summarised as follows: (i) PST reduces individuals’ intention to blow the whistle. That is, the greater the threat perceived by whistleblowers, the higher the likelihood they will choose to remain silent; (ii) the authors find evidence of a positive relationship between PSW and whistleblowing intention, whereby PSW increases individuals’ intention to blow the whistle. That is, the more serious the wrongdoing perceived by potential whistleblowers, the more likely they are to choose to blow the whistle; and (iii) the authors find evidence of the important role of rationalisation in moderating the relationships between PST, PSW, and whistleblowing intention.

The implications of these findings for business ethics scholars, managers, and end-users interested in whistleblowing are also presented.

Hengky Latan, Charbel Jose Chiappetta Jabbour & Ana Beatriz Lopes de Sousa Jabbour. 2021. To Blow or Not to Blow the Whistle: The Role of Rationalization in the Perceived Seriousness of Threats and Wrongdoing.

Managing conflict of interests in professional accounting firms
This paper synthesises the research related to managing conflict of interests in professional accounting firms. The main purpose is to provide information about the current state of knowledge on this topic and to highlight the areas requiring further research.

The extant research has been reviewed by developing a framework through the integration of Risk Management Framework by ISO 31000:2009 and the International Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants. Specifically, literature has been classified across the establishment of context, assessment, treatment, control and monitoring of conflict of interests. The literature reveals that there is a lack of understanding about how the conflict of interests operates at the level of an individual accounting professional.

Addressing this gap will help to develop behavioural interventions for strengthening the professionals’ independence in fact and, thereby, facilitating the management of conflict of interests. The key message this synthesised research provides for professional accounting firms and the regulators is that, for effective management of conflict of interests, behavioural interventions should be informed by the professionals’ unconscious (automatic) as well as their conscious (controlled) cognitive processes.

This study is the first one to view the conflict of interests in a professional accounting environment through the lens of behavioural risk management. Moreover, the framework adopted for reviewing the extant literature provides a comprehensive view of the issues surrounding the ineffective management of the conflict of interests.

Maria Ishaque. 2021. Managing Conflict of Interests in Professional Accounting Firms: A Research Synthesis.

Practice sense, empathy games, and dilemmas in tax enforcement

Tax administrators are empowered by the state to secure compliance with tax obligations. Enforcing compliance on the ground is complex, and street-level administrators often engage in the “art of the possible,” leading to dilemmas in the field.

This paper examines tax administrators’ practices with regard to Jamaican property tax defaulters with outstanding tax liabilities in excess of 3 years. Drawing on interviews with tax administrators and other key agents, the authors find that tax administrators reposition themselves from objective enforcers to empathising officials engaging in schemes of action, doing what they can do rather than what they should do. This is a practical-sense approach to securing compliance.

The authors identify two forms of empathy, assimilated and cynical, and conclude that administrators’ empathetic identification with defaulters does not necessarily arise solely from concern for social cohesion, or inter-subjective compassion, but also sometimes from self-interest.

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Carlene Beth Wynter & Lynne Oats. 2021. Knock, Knock: The Taxman’s at Your Door! Practice Sense, Empathy Games, and Dilemmas in Tax Enforcement.

Moral responsibility for systemic financial risk
This paper argues that some of the major theories in current business ethics fail to provide an adequate account of moral responsibility for the creation of systemic financial risk.

Using the trading of credit default swaps (CDS) during the 2008 financial crisis as a case study, the author formulates three challenges that these theories must address: the problem of risk imposition, the problem of unstructured collective harm and the problem of limited knowledge. These challenges will be used to work out key shortcomings of stakeholder approaches and Integrative Social Contracts Theory.

The author argues that pluralist connection models used in political theory can help to overcome these shortcomings. Adopting an approach based on these models shows that financial institutions incur obligations in five main areas: managing their own risk profile; remedying some of the harms caused by financial crises; supporting the development of better epistemic methods; curbing the transmission and amplification of initial losses; and instigating structural reforms

Jakob Moggia. 2021. Moral Responsibility for Systemic Financial Risk.

A dynamic review of the emergence of CSR communication
Recent reviews show a rapid increase in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication literature. However, while mapping the literature and the field of CSR communication, they do not fully capture the evolutionary character of this emerging interdisciplinary endeavour.

This paper seeks to fill this gap by presenting a follow-up study of the CSR communication literature from a dynamic perspective, which focuses on micro-discursive changes in the field. A bibliometric approach and frame theory are used to examine (dis)continuities in the development of field ‘frames’ in three consecutive periods between 2002 and 2016.

The article highlights the growing fragmentation of the CSR communication field over time and the existence of 11 distinct frames during the field’s emergence, whereby the two most prominent in the three time periods are the reporting and business case frames. Regardless, they are subjected to discursive changes as well. For example, they become split into stakeholder-focused, business case and institutionalisation frame and contested by the constitutive logic, respectively.

The paper argues that interdisciplinary fields like CSR communication can rarely exist without contestation. It also shows that micro-framing processes such as fragmentation, merging and extension visibly shape the identified field frames and the overall discursive dynamic of the CSR communication field while investigating their value for sustaining the field’s polyphonic state and further development. The study findings suggest that additional cross-fertilisation processes between the CSR communication literature and sustainability and digital communication research hold the potential to influence the next stage of the field’s discursive evolution.

Verk, Nataša, Golob, Urša and Podnar, Klement. 2021. A Dynamic Review of the Emergence of Corporate Social Responsibility Communication.

Is nonprofit organisation communication risky?
This paper highlights the role of nonprofit organisations in communicating risk. Nonprofit organisations have emerged as vital actors in not just working toward the benefit of human welfare and bettering society, but also making society aware of hazards or risks that exist.

The approach used to communicate risk is a critical element that ultimately will lead to the success or failure of a nonprofit organisation’s mission and objectives. Finding ways to communicate risk is a challenging task that requires being able to first make people aware of the significance or value of an act/idea or existing state, communicating the danger at hand, and then drawing on the causal relationship between the two. Although a major function, the literature on risk communication of nonprofit organisations is scarce.

This article draws on the relational theory of risk, which includes three elements: object at risk (value), risk object (danger), and association (Boholm and Corvellec 2011). The authors recommend that the best way for nonprofits-and in some instances other organisations-that need to communicate risk is to communicate this risk through the use of narratives.

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Cadet, Fabienne and Carroll, Ryall. 2019. Nonprofit Organization Communication: Risky Business.

Incongruence in CSR messaging
Although corporate social responsibility (CSR) appears to be mutually beneficial for companies and consumers, the modern marketplace has left both parties in vulnerable positions. Consumers are increasingly subjected to incongruent CSR messages such as greenwashing, while companies are trapped in a strategic positioning dilemma with regard to how to most effectively and ethically approach CSR communication.

This has led some companies to instead adopt a strategically silent approach, such as greenhushing. To capture this CSR positioning dilemma and test the positioning effects on consumers’ attributions, this study applies attribution theory to conceptualise four distinct CSR positions (uniform, discreet, washing, and apathetic) which reflect varying combinations of congruence or incongruence between a company’s external CSR communication and its actual internal CSR actions.

Using an online experiment, the effects of the CSR positions on consumer attributions for intrinsic and extrinsic CSR motivations and purchase intentions were tested across three CSR domains: environmental; labour; and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) inclusion.

Overall, the findings attest to the significant effect of internal–external congruence-based CSR positioning on how consumers respond to CSR communication. Importantly, the results indicate that discreet positioning is perceived similarly to uniform positioning, while misleading and unethical tactics such as CSR-washing are sure to backfire. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

Whitney Ginder, Wi-Suk Kwon & Sang-Eun Byun. 2021. Effects of Internal–External Congruence-Based CSR Positioning: An Attribution Theory Approach.

Do human resource disclosures reflect organisational priorities towards labour?
Our study analyses the nature, quality and extent of human resource disclosures (HRDs) of UK Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) 100 firms by relying on a novel disclosure index measuring the depth and breadth of disclosures. Contextually, the authors focus on the 5-year period following the then Labour government’s attempts to encourage firms to formally report on their human resource management practices and to foster deeper employer–employee engagement.

First, the authors evaluate the degree to which companies report comprehensively (or substantively) on a number of HRD items that the authors classify as “procedural” or “sustainable.” Second, the authors hypothesise that a company’s employee relation ideology (using a proxy to measure a company’s level of “unitarism”) is positively associated with HRD.

The results indicate that: (i) whilst there has been an increase in the breadth of HRD in terms of procedural and sustainable items being disclosed, the evolution towards a more comprehensive and in-depth form of HRD remains rather limited; and (ii) there is a positive association between a company’s employee relation ideology (unitarism) and the level of HRD. Theoretically, the authors conceive of HRD both as a reflection of an organisation’s orientation towards a key stakeholder (unitarist relations with labour) and a legitimacy seeking exercise at a time of changing societal conditions.

The authors contribute to the scant literature on the extent and determinants of HRD since prior research tends to subsume employee-related disclosures within the broader concept of social, ethical or intellectual capital disclosures. The authors also propose a disclosure checklist to underpin future HRD research.

Read this Open Access article online for free.

K. Vithana, T. Soobaroyen & C. G. Ntim. 2021. Human Resource Disclosures in UK Corporate Annual Reports: To What Extent Do These Reflect Organisational Priorities Towards Labour?

Surviving a crisis
This research examines how one’s construal level of a crisis differs by crisis type, and how the interplay of crisis type (self-threatening vs. society-threatening) and apology appeal type (emotional vs. informational) impacts the effectiveness of apology messages in a corporate crisis context.

Findings indicate that one’s mental construal toward a crisis varies by crisis type, with a self-threatening crisis leading to a lower level of construal than a society-threatening one. Findings further suggest that in a society-threatening crisis condition, an informational apology was more effective than an emotional one. However, in a self-threatening crisis condition, there was no significant difference between two different message types.

These findings offer valuable guidelines for developing effective crisis response strategy.

So Young Lee, Yoon Hi Sung, Dongwon Choi & Dong Hoo Kim. 2021. Surviving a Crisis: How Crisis Type and Psychological Distance Can Inform Corporate Crisis Responses.

Student perceptions of the hidden curriculum in responsible management education
This exploratory study analyses the extent of alignment between the formal and hidden curricula in responsible management education (RME).

Based on case study evidence of a school that has signed the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME), the authors found poor alignment between the school’s explicit RME claims and students’ lived experiences. While the formal curriculum signalled to students that RME was important, the school’s hidden curriculum sent a number of tacit messages that led students to question the relevance and applicability of responsible management.

The tacit messages that students received occurred along three “message sites” related to (a) how the formal curriculum was delivered, (b) how students and lecturers interacted, and (c) how the school was governed. On the basis of these findings the authors develop a proposition that can guide further research in this area, i.e., the connotative level of language use is an important site of misalignments between what lecturers say in relation to RME (e.g., in a syllabus) and how students interpret the meaning of their lecturers’ words.

The authors also discuss further implications of the findings for strengthening the alignment between schools’ formal RME claims and their hidden curriculum.

Catharina Høgdal, Andreas Rasche, Dennis Schoeneborn & Levinia Scotti. 2021. Exploring Student Perceptions of the Hidden Curriculum in Responsible Management Education.