Showing papers on "Situational ethics published in 1994"

Ethical decision making: A review of the empirical literature

Abstract: The authors review the empirical literature in order to assess which variables are postulated as influencing ethical beliefs and decision making. The variables are divided into those unique to the individual decision maker and those considered situational in nature. Variables related to an individual decision maker examined in this review are nationality, religion, sex, age, education, employment, and personality. Situation specific variables examined in this review are referent groups, rewards and sanctions, codes of conduct, type of ethical conflict, organization effects, industry, and business competitiveness. The review identifies the variables that have been empirically tested in an effort to uncover what is known and what we need to know about the variables that are hypothesized as determinants of ethical decision behavior.

Customer Loyalty: Toward an Integrate Conceptual Framework

Abstract: Customer loyalty is viewed as the strength of the relationship between an individual’s relative attitude and repeat patronage. The relationship is seen as mediated by social norms and situational factors. Cognitive, affective, and conative antecedents of relative attitude are identified as contributing to loyalty, along with motivational, perceptual, and behavioral consequences. Implications for research and for the management of loyalty are derived.

How do you Make it to the Top? An Examination of Influences on Women's and Men's Managerial Advancement

Abstract: Confirmatory modeling was used to test models of situational and individual influences on women's and men's managerial advancement. Although an overall model fitted the data well, separate models f...

Softlifting: A model of motivating factors

Abstract: Softlifting (software piracy by individuals) is an unethical behavior that pervades today's computer dependent society. Since a better understanding of underlying considerations of the behavior may provide a basis for remedy, a model of potential determinants of softlifting behavior is developed and tested. The analysis provides some support for the hypothesized model, specifically situational variables, such as delayed acquisition times, and personal gain variables, such as the challenge of copying, affect softlifting behavior. Most importantly, the analysis indicated that ethical perception of softlifting has no significant affect on softlifting behavior. These findings suggest major implications for both software manufacturers and academicians attempting to reduce piracy behavior through ethics instruction.

Life Task Problem Solving: Situational Affordances and Personal Needs

Abstract: An analysis of life task problem solving provides an illustration of a common language for personality and social psychologies. The personal needs of individuals and the situational affordances of social life interactively define strategic solutions to life task problems. Research on situations that encourage a gentic or communal goals in late adolescents' pursuit of the intimacy life task and on three achievement strategies in which social support takes different forms to serve different individuals' needs exemplifies the coordination of what people need to do and what situations afford to be done in daily-life problem solving.

Toward a Social Psychological Model of Strategy Use

Abstract: In the past few years, the literature has shown substantial growth in the study of language learning strategies and their relation to language learning and communication. With such rapid advances, it is necessary to closely examine the approach taken to this increasingly complex topic. Some of that complexity seems to arise from treating strategies with too broad a scope. Several other learner and situational variables interact with strategies to influence second language proficiency. Therefore, an alternate view of strategies is offered that limits their application to those behaviors that are intentional and freely chosen. Finally, a model is presented which postulates that for strategies to be used, students must be aware of one or more appropriate strategies, have reason to use them, have no impediments to their use, and should experience rewards for using them. The implications of this model for strategy training are discussed.

Situational irony: A concept of events gone awry.

Abstract: An event can be classified as situationally ironic when it deviates from routine in certain ways. In Study 1, a taxonomy of situational ironic event kinds was developed and features of these events were identified. Features included unexpectedness, human frailty, opposition, and outcome (the experience of loss or win). Study 2, category production, and Study 3, goodness-of-exemplar ratings, showed that individuals have a situational irony concept, consisting of representations of event kinds. These events exhibit typifying features, giving the concept graded structure. On this basis, knowledge of ironic events is claimed to be a form of event knowledge, along with but distinct from the event schema or script

What is systemic thinking

Abstract: This article elaborates on the historic roots of management cybernetics and its evolving identity. The nature of this evolution is explained by presenting a theory of action in organizations, which makes visible the interplay between people's autonomous actions and their role as observers of these actions. This interplay is referred to as the process of grounding epistemology in ontology. The article then discusses complexity. The idea of distinctions is central, we make distinctions about our experiences. These distinctions define our individual complexity and also our situational complexity as we ground them in shared tasks (i.e., purposeful action). It is argued that creating situational complexity requires managing our interactions and that this management is effective if it gets the best out of us and provides our actions with direction and purpose.

Illusions of Media Power: The Third-Person Effect

Abstract: This study assesses the third-person effect and its alternatives, a first-person effect and equal media effects, among a panel of respondents following the prediction of a severe earthquake and after the earthquake failed to materialize. The theoretical perspectives are provided by social comparisons and cognitive adaption theory. The findings indicate that both third-person and first-person effects result from downward social comparisons following from differences in belief in the message, accuracy of information about the predictability of earthquakes, and perception of the beliefs of others about the message. These media effects and their correlates are interpreted as illusions people create to cope with a predicted disaster and later revise to reflect situational contingencies.

Violence against women

Abstract: This article encourages the widespread adoption of an integrated, ecological framework for understanding the origins of gender-based violence. An ecological approach to abuse conceptualizes violence as a multifaceted phenomenon grounded in an interplay among personal, situational, and sociocultural factors. Although drawing on the conceptual advances of earlier theorists, this article goes beyond their work in three significant ways. First, it uses the ecological framework as a heuristic tool to organize the existing research base into an intelligible whole. Whereas other theorists present the framework as a way to think about violence, few have attempted to establish what factors emerge as predictive of abuse at each level of the social ecology. Second, this article integrates results from international and cross-cultural research together with findings from North American social science. And finally, the framework draws from findings related to all types of physical and sexual abuse of women to encourage a more integrated approach to theory building regarding gender-based abuse.

Religious fundamentalism and integrative complexity of thought: a relationship for existential content only?

Abstract: Do religious people think about their lives and the world around them in ways that differ from less religious or nonreligious persons? This paper explores the possibility that religiousness may be related to one particular structural aspect of information processing, the integrative complexity of people's thinking about various issues. Integrative Complexity. Recent conceptualizations of integrative complexity (IC) of information processing have emphasized the role of both dispositional and situational determinants, and their interaction (e.g., Tetlock 1985; Walker 1987). Here, we follow up recent work in further exploring religiousness, as well as specific dispositional (authoritarianism, dogmatism, need for cognition) and situational (content domain, familiarity with issues, and extent to which complexity is prodded) variables related to IC of thought, with a particular focus on religious fundamentalism and content domains.

An Examination of the Cognitive Processes Used to Handle Employee Job Problems

Abstract: This study examined the cognitive processes involved in handling job problems in two business organizations. Two situational characteristics, discrepancy between a goal and performance and the freq...

Attributional patterns for expressions of love

Abstract: Words of love can be compelling messages in romantic relationships. However, like most messages, they serve multiple functions in accomplishing interactants’ goals. This study examined attributions about direct verbal expressions of love. Results indicated that initial expressions of love are typically verbalized by males and have several functions: 1) expression of authentic feelings, 2) ulterior motives, 3) situational influences, 4) comforting, and 5) confusion. Declarations were perceived differently according to gender and whether one initiated or received the message. Specifically, females and initiators were more likely to attribute statements to authentic feelings. Males mentioned situational influences more often.

Commitment to political tolerance: Situational and activity-based differences

Abstract: Survey research on political tolerance has consistently found situational and activity-based differences in levels of support for the rights of political opposition. The present inquiry is based on three studies that explore these differences. These studies reveal two distinct factors related to situational and activity-based variation in tolerance. First, attitudinal tolerance tends to be less when the activity in question may affect a respondent's loved ones or home community, particularly in situations where there is relatively little consensus on whether an activity should be allowed. Second, attitudinal tolerance is less in situations where greater threat is associated with the consequences of the activity in question.

Preschool children's understanding of the situational determinants of others' emotions

Abstract: Two experiments investigated 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children's ability to use situational information to make judgements about others' emotional reactions. Children were presented with stories and drawings depicting other children in emotion-producing situations and were asked to make emotion judgements by selecting one of two facial expressions. It was predicted that children would make more accurate judgements when the stories contained explicit, rather than implicit, statements about the characters' goals. Based on Weiner and Graham's (1984) developmental model of emotion understanding, it was also predicted that the youngest children would be able to make outcomedependent, but not attributiondependent emotion judgements. Contrary to expectation, children did not make significantly more accurate judgements in the explicit story condition. Consistent with Weiner and Graham's model, the 3-year-olds could make outcome-dependent emotion judgements, but only the 4- and 5-year-olds could make attrib...

Workplace reasons for saying you're sorry: Discourse task management and apology in telephone interviews

Abstract: We propose a model of the speech act of apologizing that ranges apologies along a continuum from the most situational, on one end, to the most personal, on the other. We then analyze the 252 occurrences of I'm sorry, excuse me, and beg pardon and their variants in 62 telephone interviews conducted for a public‐opinion polling service. Very few of the apologies in the interviews are responses to particular personal offenses, intended to convey regret and apparently successful in doing so. Rather, because of the necessity for discourse task management in this genre, interviewers and respondents use apologies at the situational end of the continuum. Such apologies signal and remedy minor interactional difficulties and establish cooperative rapport. Situational apologies also serve as indirect ways of rejecting questions or answers or cajoling reluctant respondents. Situational apologies are routinized in origin and unelaborated in form; their function is to restore social equilibrium rather than to express g...

An Exploratory Examination of Situational Variables, Effort and Salesperson Performance

Abstract: This study investigated the relative impact of situational variables and salesperson effort on sales performance. The results from a sample of 249 salespeople suggest that several situational variables can affect sales performance. Salesperson effort was shown to explain additional variance in sales performance beyond that explained by the study’s situational variables. Implications for sales force management are also discussed.

Framing and situational ethics

Abstract: Prospect theory (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) suggests a number of subjective biases to which human judgment is prone (such as the framing effect). Economic consequences of such biases have received ample attention; however, potentially important ethical implications have been neglected. We conducted an experiment in which 81 M.B.A. students were asked to choose between two courses of action, one less ethical than the alternative. Printed scenarios varied the framing of the choice problems. Findings suggest that the propensity to choose a less ethical course of action over a more ethical alternative can be influenced by how a decision problem is described or framed.

The Poetics and Politics of Sacred Space: Towards a Critical Phenomenology of Religion

Abstract: What is the sacred? In the study of religion, two broad lines of definition have been advanced, one substantial, the other situational. The former claims to have penetrated and reported the essential experience of the sacred, while the latter analyzes the practical, relational, and often contested dynamics of its production and reproduction. In this essay, I have set myself the task of weaving together the substantial and the situational through a critical rereading, against the grain, perhaps, of the influential work of the Dutch phenomenologist of religion, Gerardus van der Leeuw. I hope to uncover, in the process, the situational, relational, and contested aspects that lie hidden at the heart of a classic substantial definition of the sacred.

Contextual influences on nurses’ conflict management strategies

Abstract: Conflict management research has focused on the personal nature of strategies employed and paid little attention to the contextual influences upon those strategy choices. The present study investigates several contextual influences and reveals that conceptions of professional role and of situational and organizational contexts are good discriminators of the choice of a conflict management strategy. In situations involving conflict inherent in professional truth‐telling/deception dilemmas, characteristics of professional role, and organizational situation are important influences upon nurses’ choices of a conflict management strategy.

Situated address and the social construction of “in‐law” relationships

Abstract: This study examined address practices between young American couples and their parents‐in‐law in the transitional period of early marriage. Couples’ self‐reports of their preferred modes of address toward mother‐ and father‐in‐law, and the rationales for their choices were analyzed. Four themes were identified as key in guiding and constraining the selection of address forms: social conventions requiring a show of respect toward parents‐in‐law as weighed against pressures toward the expression of intimacy; loyalty to one's biological parents; situational cues; and the desire to publicly mark the event of marriage as a significant transition. The findings are taken as evidence for the salience of naming and address behavior in the construction of family relationship definitions.

Sources of and responses to acute stress in sport as a function of selected personal dispositions, situational appraisals, and cultural differences

Abstract: The purposes of this study were to examine sources of stress in sport and investigate the ways in which psychological dispositions and situational appraisals influence the cognitive and behavioural responses of basketball referees and players to acute stress. The study consisted of three parts. In study I, 64 Australian and 75 Greek basketball referees completed a survey to ascertain the sources of acute stress experienced during a game. Results showed cross-cultural and age differences in the referees' perceived intensity of stress. Higher degrees of stress were experienced by adolescent compared to adult Australian referees, and by Australian compared to Greek referees. Among the most stressful incidents during officiating for all groups were "Making a Mistake, Threats of Physical Abuse, Experiencing an Injury, Presence of My Supervisor," and "Verbal Abuse by Coaches." Study II examined the approach and avoidance coping responses of basketball referees during three acute stress situations (i.e., Making a Mistake, Aggressive Reactions by Coaches or Players, and Presence of Important Others) as identified in study I. The consistency of the subjects' coping responses across the three stressful situations as a function of their appraisals and selected psychological dispositions was also examined. Psychological inventories administered to 133 Australian and 163 Greek officials measured self-esteem, optimism, and general coping style. In addition, a situationspecific Coping Style Inventory (CSI) for acute stressors was developed for this study. Findings indicated that referees exhibited consistent coping styles across the selected situations. Significant cross-cultural differences were found in the referees' personal dispositions and coping responses, but not in their situational appraisals. Specifically, Greek referees scored higher than their Australian counterparts in monitoring and lower in blunting. Also, Australian basketball officials employed significantly more approach strategies than Greeks in all three stressful situations. Older referees reported higher selfesteem than their younger counterparts. Gender differences were evident in the referees' perceptions of stress and in the use of avoidance coping. Female referees were

The Narrative, The Situational, The Biographical. Scandinavian Sociology of Body Culture Traying a Third Way

Abstract: New narrative discourse patterns from Finland and Denmark raise epistemological questions about what the sociology of sport is able or unable to say They leave the field of positivist "it"-language (about the object) and often turn towards experience and memory in "1" language (about and from out the subject) This is continuing some earlier approaches from psychological introspection, psycho-analysis and phenomenology, but the established dualism of subjectivism versus objectivism is not sufficient to describe the innovative process Is there a third way or could there be third ways - social biographical, autobiographical, situational, scenical, social ecological - to express the dialogical dimension of human existence, the "thou"? This epistemological self-questioning is of special importance for social studies of sport and movement culture treating the bodily dialogue between social beings

Promoting Situational Support for Nurses in Practice

Abstract: Situational support entails promoting autonomy, control over practice, group cohesion, manager consideration, and substantive exchange. Support can reinforce nurses' coping mechanisms, preserve their integrity, and thereby promote quality patient care. Using concept clarification and case examples the authors identify support mechanisms and coping styles for nurses at work and discuss how situational support can be used to cope with stress.