ABSTRACT
Ethical decisions determine which individuals and/or groups benefit, and which suffer. Such decisions by executives impact front line providers directly and customers indirectly; they are important because repercussions in service interactions feel personal. This qualitative study fills an important gap in the service literature by exploring how high-level executives make ethical decisions, creating values and culture within an organization. The results include testable propositions, which were developed using a grounded theory approach, wherein high-level executives in successful service organizations responded through in-depth interviews. Complete interview transcripts were analyzed using standard qualitative methodology, including open coding to better understand and categorize the data, axial coding to seek out crucial relationships between concepts, and selective coding to develop Research Propositions regarding the central phenomena under study: the executives’ personal backgrounds, values, organizational culture and values, and their impact on marketing decisions.
Data analyses revealed two groups of interviewees, one more outcome-oriented in decision- making and the other more process-oriented. The organizations led by more outcome-oriented executives have strong family-like (or paternalistic) cultures; they tend to be more externally focused and to take more analytical measures of success into account. On the other hand, the organizations led by more process-oriented executives value adaptability and diversity; they tend to be more internally focused and to use a blend of intuition and analytical measures in evaluating decision outcomes. Thus, the findings offer a new look at how differences between executives that focus on processes and those that focus on outcomes may shape organizational cultures and lead to consideration of different criteria in making and evaluating ethical decisions.
