ABSTRACT
To think about what sparked my interest and work related to moral reasoning, I delved back decades to my doctoral program in management at Texas A&M University. True confessions – starting out, I wasn’t interested in moral reasoning at all. But I was intrigued (for some reason I didn’t yet understand) by the many business ethics scandals in the early to mid-1980s (scandals that were thought to be a “fad,” by the way). I wondered what we knew about the thinking and behaviour of those involved. Over time, I became even more interested in understanding ethical and unethical behaviour in an organizational (work) context. I discovered after an extensive search that the management literature had little to offer from a behavioural perspective. There had been normative pieces written by philosophers about what businesspeople “should” and “should not” do and a few survey studies that asked managers about their experiences, but there was little theoretical or empirical work on the question of what employees think and do and why they behave as they do. That presented an opportunity for a curious doctoral student looking for a way to contribute.
