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Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior

Volume 12, 2025

Moral Decision-Making in Organizations

  • Maryam Kouchaki1 and Isaac H. Smith2
  • 1Department of Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA; email: [email protected] 2Department of Management, Marriott School of Business, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, USA
  • Vol. 12:45-72 (Volume publication date January 2025)
  • First published as a Review in Advance on November 15, 2024
  • Copyright © 2025 by the author(s).
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information.

Abstract

Research on moral decision-making in organizations has expanded significantly over the past few decades. In this review, we build on prior comprehensive reviews on the topic to provide an updated view of the field, based on the latest findings. We first provide a brief historical overview of influential theories of moral decision-making and then describe the individual characteristics, interpersonal factors, and organizational factors that have been shown to influence people's morally relevant choices, as well as the cognitive, affective, and even physiological processes at play. We then provide a more critical view of the field and focus on what we do not know, suggesting several avenues for future research. Specifically, we call for more research that incorporates the temporal dynamics of moral decision-making in organizations and that better accounts for the nature of the real-world moral issues people face at work. We conclude with some practical implications.

Keyword(s): behavioral ethics, business ethics, ethical behavior, ethical decision-making, moral decision-making, moral psychology
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2025-01-21
2025-06-20
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Moral Decision-Making in Organizations
Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 12, 45 (2025); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-110622-045715
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