Moral compliance as facilitator for ethical reflection in management: catalysts and situations

Abstract

With the aim of improving the quality and efficiency of corporate management, a number of standardised norms have been developed, such as TQM, but in parallel; for example; SCOR or ISO9000. Nevertheless, our study of the literature reflects a lack of inclusion of both aspects in this regard. Thus, it is necessary to fight for the inclusion of ethics into management (struggle theory of ethics) and it should be included not only with individual aspects, but also from an organisational perspective. Compliance has been used as the system for the implementation thereof in the corporate setting. The authors of this paper argue that if a ‘moral compliance; combination of moral hazard and compliance’ could be developed into which moral issues are incorporated with a view to delimiting the ethical damage to third parties when management decision are taken; the manager will be more efficient from an ethical view, at least. A total of 64 organisations participated in the empirical study, and we conducted 78 in-depth, two-stage interviews with managers from 2016 to 2018 to propose the factors (65.2% with links to TQM (Advanced Management and EFQM Excellence Model)). Then, the combination of hazard and compliance will make moral issues more explicit, and at the same time, it will make the work of the management more efficient by administrating moral issues. This effort will reduce the ethical damage to third parties when management decision is taken.

Keywords:

• moral compliance
• moral hazard
• asymmetries
• TQM
• EFQM Excellence Model (EEM)
• advanced management

JEL:

• code: G32
• M14

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed 10.1080/14783363.2019.1668263.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Unviersidad del País Vasco [grant number US17_24].