从“好士兵”到“坏苹果”:组织中道德许可研究述评

From Good Soldiers to Bad Apples: A Literature Review of Moral Licensing in Organization

随着研究者对员工非伦理行为的关注,用道德许可来解读员工非伦理行为成为近几年组织管理研究的一个新兴研究主题。组织中的道德许可指的是员工因过去或未来工作中的行为,而允许自己减少工作中的伦理行为或增加工作中的非伦理行为。在文献梳理的基础上,本文回顾并评价了道德许可的概念发展、测量方法、与相似概念的异同和理论基础,重点分析了道德许可在组织管理的现有研究,包括前因、结果和调节变量。未来研究可以从以下几个方面拓展道德许可在管理领域的研究:开发中国情境下道德许可的测量量表、探索组织或团队层面的跨层作用、探讨组织情境的调节作用、丰富道德许可对道德存疑行为作用的研究以及研究个体特征和情境对许可路径的影响。

Along with researchers taking attention on employees＇ unethical behaviors, applying moral licensing to interpreting immoral behaviors in organization has been an emerging research topic. Moral licensing in organization refers that employees allow themselves to decrease ethical acts or increase unethical behaviors in organization owing to past or future morally laudable behaviors. Based on the literature review of moral licensing, this paper reviews and comments on the concepts, measurement of moral licensing, similarities and differences with related concepts and theoretical foundation. Besides, it emphatically analyses existing research of moral licensing in management, including antecedents, outcomes and moderators. Future research can expend the study of moral licensing in organization in following ways： developing scales of moral licensing in Chinese context, exploring the cross-level effect at the organizational or team level, enriching the effect of moral licensing on moral dubious behaviors and probing into the influences of personal and context features on licensing process.