Respostas gerenciais a dilemas estratégicos: capturando políticas de decisão e suas fundações morais

Abstract

The morality of managers, questioned in cases of corporate scandals, is identified as a probable cause of different policies in managerial decision-making. This theme, discussed in the Stakeholder Theory, despite the theoretical contributions from other disciplines, remains concentrated on relativistic explanations. In order to point out new microfoundations of alternative managerial responses to moral boycotts - as a phenomenon that involves conflicts between different actors -, the Theory of Moral Foundations (TFM) was used, an approach that mixes cultural and evolutionary moral anthropology. TFM describes morality as a biopsychic device responsible for cognition prior to rationality. This process takes place through six moral foundations: (1) care-harm; (2) freedom-oppression; (3) justice-cheating; (4) loyalty-betrayal; (5) authority-subversion and (6) sanctity-degradation — responsible for regulating the basic feelings that mediate the individual's relations with culture. With this theoretical background, 48 scenarios were developed to capture management decision policies experimentally and indirectly (through policy capturing). Composed of vignettes of advertisements and boycotts, the cases included factors and values of moral and strategic variables, and all the possibilities of combination between them. In a survey questionnaire, the assessments of 151 managers to advertising rejoinders representing four possible responses to the boycotts were collected: (1) reinforcement; (2) retraction; (3) flexibilization and (4) change of the original campaign. In addition to the scenarios, the declared morality of the sample was also collected, with which it was possible - through Coincidence analysis (CNA) - to counteract direct and indirect responses, i.e. , what the managers talk about their morality and what they actually do about it. The results highlight: the mostly moral character of management decision; the presence of impression management and corporate hypocrisy; minimally necessary and sufficient conditions that favor either stakeholders or organizations; and the need for the pluralization of moral feelings as a point of contact capable of awakening empathic behavior between the parties involved. The research offers theoretical and empirical support for the construction of a Theory of Propaganda Stakeholders, based on a discussion in business ethics about the (i)legitimacy of organizations in the public sphere as producers of artificial moralities, based on a capitalist instrumental relationship, potentially harmful to society.