What Develops in Moral Identities? A Critical Review

Abstract

According to the standard model of moral identity development, moral identities emerge during adolescence and early adulthood. Contrary to this assumption, however, moral identity research has consistently failed to demonstrate any age-related change in this developmental period. The present paper discusses implications of this non-finding. It is argued that researchers need to broaden the scope of inquiry and include developmental aspects of the moral identity construct that have been neglected in the past. Three areas are identified where moral identity development likely occurs in adolescence and beyond: (1) context-dependent differentiation and integration of the self-importance of moral values, (2) growth in internal moral motivation and (3) unfolding of narratives of moral responsibility. It is suggested that any systematic investigation into these areas will reveal important developmental changes in moral identities and, thus, will confirm the developmental nature of the moral identity construct.

An Identity Perspective on Ethical Leadership to Explain Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Interplay of Follower Moral Identity and Leader Group Prototypicality

“…Firstly, our results indicate that followers' moral identity can be altered by strong ethical leaders. As such, our finding contributes to the debate about flexibility versus stability of moral identity across people's life spans (Krettenauer and Hertz 2015;Leavitt et al 2015). Although it was beyond the scope of the study, it would be interesting to determine whether an ethical leader's influence over a follower's moral identity persists over time-for instance, when an employee moves to a new work group or is promoted into a leadership position (Zhu et al 2016).…”

“…Furthermore, identity theory (Burke and Stets 2009;Stryker and Burke 2000) suggests that the general content of an individual's self-concepts can change over time. Hence, an individual's moral identity, while somewhat stable, may develop across adolescence (Jennings et al 2015;Krettenauer and Hertz 2015) and change as a result of environmental stimuli such as being exposed to an ethical leader (Lord and Brown 2004;Shao et al 2008;Zhu 2008;Zhu et al 2016).…”

“…The underlying reasoning is that the formation and salience of identity facets can change through work context factors such as leadership (Welbourne and Paterson 2017;Zhu et al 2016), which in turn strongly informs behavior (van Knippenberg et al 2004. As such, moral identity is no exception, in that it too is partly considered to be a fluid characteristic rather than a (relatively) fixed and unchanging feature (Jennings et al 2015;Krettenauer and Hertz 2015).…”

The moral self and moral identity: Developmental questions and conceptual challenges

“…Yet in spite of such high hopes, scholars nevertheless concede that it has proven to be ‘a challenge to measure the construct and to map its developmental course’ (Lapsley & Carlo, , p. 4). Others have highlighted the conspicuous absence of strong developmental models of moral identity in the literature (Hardy & Carlo, ; Lapsley, ; Nucci, ), with some asserting that current research has ‘largely failed’ (Krettenauer & Hertz, , p. 143) to shed light on the developmental nature of the construct.…”

Phronesis, Virtues and the Developmental Science of Character

“…Of course, moral identity is not the same as moral character, as Nucci (2018) points out, and the possibility that moral identity could be false (Moshman, 2004), have a dark side (Lapsley, 2016) or be problematic in other ways (Nucci, 2004) is not disputed. But for my money there is not a single other construct that is better associated with a wider swath of moral behavior, and while moral identity has been scored for not having a clear developmental grounding in childhood (Krettenauer & Hertz, 2015) and for being a "single component" (the target article), there is promising new research on both fronts.…”