“Doing well by doing good”? Ambivalent moral framing in organizations

Responding to conflicting pressures to justify decisions both in terms of ethical standards and in terms of self-interested rationality, actors in organizations often make the dubious claim that value-driven goals are good for business. Whereas much work has already explored cases where moral and self-interested rationales clash, this review explores situations where they coincide, and discusses the factors that would lead a manager to choose to publicly frame an issue in moral or pragmatic terms. We analyze cases of mismatch between private and public moralization (e.g., moral muteness and moral hypocrisy), illustrating the value of considering these two levels of moral framing separately. Then we identify some of the precursors of moral awareness (moral intuitions, moral template matching and meta-perceptions) that signal the availability of a moral frame for a given issue. Finally, we explore what positive or negative consequences actors expect to result from public moralization, and present what research is available regarding the accuracy of these expectations.