Organizational resources vs personal resources: A case for ethical consumption

Abstract

Discretionary resources i.e. organizational resources that the employees can use as needed are a part of many organizations these days. They can range from inexpensive things such as stationary items to expensive things such as international flight tickets. How much the usage of such discretionary resources adds to the cost to the organization depends primarily on the size of the organization and how freely and frequently the employees can use them. It also raises few pertinent questions, how employees consume these resources? Do they treat these resources as they would treat their own, or are they more liberal in their consumption? Do they try to exploit such resources? And if they do discriminate between organizational and personal resources, what are the reasons that cause such behavior? These are the primary questions around which this study is based. These questions fall under ethical decision-making process. James Rest’si proposed a fourcomponent model for individual ethical decision making whereby a moral agent must recognize a moral issue, make a moral judgment, resolve to place moral concerns ahead of others or moral intent and act on the moral concerns. In 1991, Jones developed the Issue–Contingent modelii which synthesized earlier studies and built on Rest’s model. Jones proposed the concept of moral intensity, which influences ethical decision making and is comprised of six factors: Magnitude of Consequence, Social Consensus, Probability of Effect, Temporal Immediacy, Proximity and Concentration of Effect. The aim of our study is to empirically address the question of unethical consumption of discretionary resources in an organization by studying and understanding the ethical decision-making process of employees through the lens of Rest’s four component model and Jones’ Issue-Contingent model. Section II talks about the significance of this study in an organizational context. Section III is a discussion about the existing literature and the research that has taken place in this field or the closely related fields. The following section describes the methodology that has been followed for the study. Section V is a discussion about the findings from the study. It is followed by a conclusion and the concluding section talks about recommendations and future scope.