In search of a fitting moral psychology for practical wisdom: Exploring a missing link in virtuous management

Abstract

While business as a social activity has involved communities of persons embedded in dense relational networks and practices for thousands of years, the modern legal, theoretical psychological, and moral foundations of business have progressively narrowed our understanding of practical wisdom. Although practical wisdom has recently regained ground in business ethics and management studies, thanks mainly to Anscombe's recovery of virtue ethics, Anscombe herself once observed that it lacks, and has even neglected, a moral psychology that genuinely complements the nuanced philosophical perspective of a virtue-centered moral philosophy. Herein, we offer one way to fill this gap by suggesting two opposing psychological paradigms, namely the inter-processual self and the autonomous self, which are classified according to the assumptions they make about the self, human agency and action more broadly, as well as how they relate to practical wisdom. Upon presenting these moral psychologies, we will bring this proposal into conversation with business ethics to show how the IPS paradigm can enable and support virtuous management.

Humanizing Stakeholders by Rethinking Business

“…Scholars have focused on how teaching prevalent, profit-oriented, business theories to future managers causes morally disengaged management practices ( Ferraro et al, 2005 ; Ghoshal, 2005 ). As an alternative, scholars suggest that teaching future managers more humanistic and ethical theories will lead to more morally engaged management practices ( Newkirk and Freeman, 2008 ; Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang, 2015 ; Akrivou and Scalzo, 2020 ). While this is important, it begs the question if business can make individual stakeholders who are not managers more morally considerate.…”

“…Our work investigates individual stakeholders’ immediate reactions to an observed business orientation. While these immediate reactions are important, developing a moral community of stakeholders also requires a long-lasting transformation of individual stakeholders’ character or virtues ( Akrivou and Scalzo, 2020 ). Laboratory experiments can disentangle the different psychological mechanisms that contribute to such a transformation.…”

Virtue and virtuousness in organizations: Guidelines for ascribing individual and organizational moral responsibility

“…To integrate inner aspects of virtue, such as character and reasons for action, theoretical and empirical research could take into account, for instance, issues related to individual motivations for ethical behavior in the workplace and see how these fit with the Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition. Furthermore, the role of phronesis in the individual and organizational conditions for moral responsibility needs to be investigated, given its central role in the virtue ethics tradition and its growing relevance for leadership decision‐making in business and organization studies (Akrivou & Scalzo, 2020; Ames et al., 2020; Bachmann et al., 2017; Ferrero & Sison, 2014; Ferrero et al., 2020; Diez Gómez & Rodriguez Córdoba, 2019). A robust account that connects the concepts of virtue and virtuousness with each other needs to integrate each of their characteristics without dismissing or losing their important features (Sison & Ferrero, 2015).…”

Person-Centered Leadership: The Practical Idea as a Dynamic Principle for Ethical Leadership

“…He continually employed principles related to current theoretical philosophy in an attempt to bring these approaches closer to the practical realm of business (de la Vega, 2009;Jiménez Torres, 2017). 1 The classical approach to practical wisdom enriched with Personalism and applied to managerial action reveals the possibility of generating a connection between leaders and their teams in line with current efforts to expand the notion of practical wisdom (Akrivou and Scalzo, 2020). Therefore, this article delves into Llano's work in order to trace the personalistic elements that inspired his proposal concerning the relationship between managerial action and practical reason in search of a way to practically integrate all of these features.…”

“…47-56 and II-II ps., Q. 182. part of human actions and experiences and, more specifically, interpersonal relationships (Akrivou and Scalzo, 2020). The bivalent nature of reason is evident; it is an intellectual virtue that perfects reason in its practical function, but it acquires moral character because the first principle of practical reason is based on the notion of good (STh, I-II, q.…”