Joshua D. Margolis

Harvard University | Harvard · Harvard Business School

The second rationale for a broader sense of fiduciary duty rests on its power to guide leaders as they encounter tensions between the central commitments of the medical profession and the imperatives of business. Health-related businesses are not alone in facing this challenge. Professional service firms, such as architecture or civil engineering f...

Social enterprises seek to improve human and environmental welfare through profit-generating businesses. These hybrid organizations embed multiple, often conflicting, logics and identities. Whereas their social missions espouse normative identities and social welfare logics that emphasize moral value and a broad set of stakeholder needs, their prof...

In this article we introduce AMR's Special Topic Forum on Understanding and Creating Caring and Compassionate Organizations. We outline why the time is right for such a forum, uncover scholarly and philosophical roots of a focus on compassion and care, and provide a brief introduction to the diverse and rich set of articles contained in this forum....

We investigate how, why and when activating economic schemas reduces the compassion that individuals extend to others in need when delivering bad news. Across three experiments, we show that unobtrusively priming economic schemas decreases the compassion that individuals express to others in need, that this effect is mediated by dampened feelings o...

Does power corrupt a moral identity, or does it enable a moral identity to emerge? Drawing from the power literature, we propose that the psychological experience of power, although often associated with promoting self-interest, is associated with greater self-interest only in the presence of a weak moral identity. Furthermore, we propose that the...

Ramesh Patel, a high potential employee, was excited to be named to the company's New Horizons Board, a select team responsible for producing recommendations for new products or line extensions for Aragon Entertainment. Patel's co-worker and friend, Jeremy Gibson was also named to the Board, and the two were assigned to work together on a sub-taskf...

Learning Objective: To explore considerations in developing a digital/social-media marketing strategy and justifying its components.

Denise Frazer and Paolo Canto, two HBS students, have decided to give each other feedback on their class participation. While Denise believes that she has provided concrete, actionable feedback to Paolo, she does not feel that Paolo is reciprocating. His feedback is general and superficial. Denise and Paolo have set a time to meet to discuss their...

Michael Lester, a consultant with Lachlan, was frustrated by his client's unwillingness to provide key data for an important presentation. Lester must decide how best to confront Nadine Robert, his client, knowing that his personal success and the reputation of his consulting firm hinge on his ability to build and sustain a strong relationship. How...

Danielle Marcoux, Director of Web Design at AdNet2Win Technologies, must decide how best to confront Charles Davide, the Chief Technology Officer and leader of the design team charged with overseeing a major upgrade of the company's proprietary customer loyalty platform. Davide has kept tight control on the development process and has not allowed t...

Mary Griffin, Vice President of Consumer Products, must provide feedback to one of her direct reports, Simon York. York is a strong performer, but he has displayed some poor interpersonal skills in the manner in which he interacts with his team and the production staff. Griffin needs to provide feedback to help prevent York from derailing in his ca...

In four laboratory studies, we find that regulatory focus induced by situational cues (such as the framing of an unrelated task) or primed influences people's likelihood to cross ethical boundaries. A promotion focus leads individuals to be more likely to act unethically than a prevention focus (Studies 1, 2, and 3). These higher levels of dishones...

If you were diagnosed with a terminal illness, how would you respond and what would you do with your remaining time? Avi Kremer contemplates four options for how to devote himself 18 months after being diagnosed with ALS. His experience thus far and the choices he faces foster insight into building resilience and finding purpose. The case documents...

RESPONDING TO an intensely competitive marketplace, managers often see interdisciplinary teams as a panacea for whatever ails an organization. What Anne Donnellon and Joshua Margolis make clear, however, is that the team strategy will not work unless a company overcomes or avoids five core dilemmas. To help executives—including design managers—arou...

How can individuals equip themselves to exercise leadership in the face of moral adversity? This six-session module aims to prepare students to meet moral responsibility when it is simultaneously most essential and most difficult. Moral adversity refers to situations in which a person confronts a pressing moral responsibility-to oppose wrong-doing,...

Three pressing challenges (equity split, extent of commitment to social responsibility, and product discoloration) confront VeeV, the world's first alcoholic beverage infused with acai berries. Brothers Courtney and Carter Reum founded VeeV in 2007 and the firm has experienced rapid growth since then. The case documents the backgrounds of the young...

In an era of rising concern about financial performance and social ills, companies’ economic achievements and negative externalities prompt a common question: Does it pay to be good? For thirty-five years, researchers have been investigating the empirical link between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP). In...

Considerable research has examined how procedural injustice affects victims and witnesses of unfavorable outcomes, with little attention to the “performers” who deliver these outcomes. Drawing on dissonance theory, we hypothesized that performers' reactions to procedural injustice in delivering unfavorable outcomes are moderated by prosocial identi...

We develop grounded theory about how individuals respond to the subjective experi- ence of performing "necessary evils" and how that influences the way they treat targets of their actions. Despite the importance and difficulty of delivering just, compassionate treatment when it is most needed—when necessarily harming another person—little research...

The book examines ethics and employment issues in contemporary Human Resource Management (HRM). Written by an international team of academics from universities in the UK, the US, Australia and New Zealand, it examines the problems and opportunities facing employers and employees. The book subdivides into three sections: Part I assesses the context...

Acknowledgments: We are indebted to Desiree Schaan for her assistance with coding the articles. We also appreciate insightful comments by Christopher Marquis and Nitin Nohria, research assistance by Alyssa Bittner-Gibbs, and the collegiality of Janet Kiholm Smith and Daniel Turban for sharing additional information about their published studies.

Ethical challenges abound in HRM. Each day, in the course of executing and communicating HR decisions, managers have the potential to change, shape, redirect, and fundamentally alter the course of other people's lives. Managers make hiring decisions that reward selected applicants with salaries, benefits, knowledge, and skills, but leave the remain...

This paper analyzes members' sensemaking of organizational actions using virtue frames and its effects on members' relationships with the organization in the context of the events of September 11th. We explore the use of three virtue frames to make sense of a university's response to the events of 9–11-01. We examine the effects of interpreted virt...

Codes of conduct have long been a feature of corporate life. Today, they are arguably a legal necessity--at least for public companies with a presence in the United States. But the issue goes beyond U.S. legal and regulatory requirements. Sparked by corruption and excess of various types, dozens of industry, government, investor, and multisector gr...

In order to produce a beneficial result, professionals must sometimes cause harm to another human being. To capture this phenomenon, we introduce the construct of "necessary evils" and explore the inherent challenges such tasks pose for those who must perform them. Whereas previous research has established the importance of treating victims of nece...

Efforts to trace the evolutionary antecedents of human morality introduce challenges and opportunities for business ethics. The biological precedents of responsibility suggest that human tendencies to respond morally are deeply rooted. This does not mean, however, that those tendencies are always consistent with ends human beings seek to pursue. Th...

The Academy of Management (AOM) was founded to help meet society’s social and economic objectives and in so doing, serve the public interest. However, scholarship in our field has pursued society’s economic objectives much more than it has its social ones. Surveying the supply and demand for all of the empirical research published by the AOM betwee...

Companies are increasingly asked to provide innovative solutions to deep-seated problems of human misery, even as economic theory instructs managers to focus on maximizing their shareholders' wealth. In this paper, we assess how organization theory and empirical research have thus far responded to this tension over corporate involvement in wider so...

Psychological forces in play across individual, group, and organizational levels of analysis increase the likelihood that people in business organizations will engage in misconduct. Therefore, it is argued, we must turn our attention from dominant normative and empirical trends in business ethics, which revolve around boundaries and constraints, an...

Why does it matter that every negative thought you have had about car salespeople, they have likely had about you? The answer to this question opens up the distinctive challenges, and opportunities, facing business ethics. Those challenges and opportunities emerge from the significant bearing organizational reality has upon individuals' conduct. As...

Corporations have responded to society’s plea to provide innovative solutions to deep-seated problems of human misery. Organization and management scholarship can play an important role in understanding and guiding this corporate action. To date, this challenge has largely been ignored. Instead, the empirical quest to link a firm’s social investmen...

The organization is importantly different from both the nation-state and the individual and hence needs its own ethical models and theories, distinct from political and moral theory. To develop a case for organizational ethics, this paper advances arguments in three directions. First, it highlights the growing role of organizations and their distin...

A merican CEOs make a great deal of money. The amounts must stagger people who are unfamiliar with contemporary business prac-tice. The AFL-CIO's Executive PayWatch reports that the average CEO in the S&P 500 made $14.2 million in 2007. 1 Looking across companies, we find that the CEOs of the 1,000 largest public firms in the United States (ranked...