The Clean Conscience at Work: Emotions, Intuitions and Morality

How do people decide what is right and wrong, and to what extent are their actions guided by such moral considerations? Inspired by philosophical traditions, early approaches to morality focused on rationality, and assumed that people arrive at moral standards by logical thought. More recently, however, psychologists have explored the influence of emotions and intuitions on morality, and evidence has been accumulating that moral decisions and behaviours are far from rational, but instead, are guided by intuitions and situational considerations. For example, seemingly irrelevant concerns such as keeping one’s mind and spirit clean and pure can change people’s moral judgment. Emotions can also influence behaviour, and positive, uplifting emotions such as elevation and gratitude can be harnessed to produce beneficial outcomes for individuals and organizations alike. Furthermore, people appear to aspire to an equilibrium of moral self-worth, and engage in more or less ethical behaviour depending on their currently perceived moral integrity. Thus, morality and ethical behaviour is less likely to reside in the person than in the context, and thus, for the study of spirituality it might be beneficial to focus on people’s situational constraints in the workplace rather than their stable dispositions. Further, because of their potential to inspire positive action, organizations might aim to make positive moral emotions, such as gratitude, elevation and awe part of everyday work contexts. Overall, in organizations and the workplace the goal shifts from trying to identify the moral individual to providing the contextual conditions that appeal to spiritual concerns in order to foster moral behaviour. In his book “The Happiness Hypothesis” Jonathan Haidt (2006) concludes an extensive review of insights from psychological research and works of ancient wisdom such as religious and philosophical writings with the following recommendation for the life lived well: “Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger (p. 239).” This recommendation emphasizes the centrality of finding meaning in one’s work, and because illuminating people’s desire for a connection to something larger has been an emerging goal across many theoretical and practical disciplines (e.g., Elkins, 2001; Emmons & Paloutzian, 1999; Hill, Pargament, Hood, McCullough, Swyer, Larson, Zinnbauer, 2000; LaPierre, 1994; Miller & Thoresen, 2003; Zinnbauer, Pargament, & Scott, 1999), recently various authors have started exploring how people’s spiritual experiences and religious practices relate to their work lives (e.g., Biberman & Tischler, 2008; Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2010a; Gotsis & Kortezi, 2008; Mitroff & Denton, 1999) . Although the lack of acknowledged definitions of spirituality and religion has been pointed out as a factor in hampering research developments (e.g., Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2010b; Geh & Tan, 2009), in scientific psychology, tremendous progress has been made in areas in which definitional issues continue to stir debate, as is the case in the field of emotion. For example, one scientific volume entitled The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions (1994) considers basic questions relating to definitional issues, with various eminent researchers giving their very distinct, and often contradictory answers. Although the eternal debates regarding definitional and other basic questions go on, in the meantime researchers seem to have decided to just “get on with it” and study emotional phenomena anyway. More problematic for a research field, however, is the lack of commonly agreed methods, which makes empirical evidence difficult to compare from study to study, therefore impeding progress, and this has been noted as a problem for the field of workplace spirituality (Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2010b; Gotsis & Kortezi, 2008). Because of the lack of grounding of the approach in theory, Giacalone and Jurkiewicz (2010b) suggest that studying workplace spirituality would greatly benefit from interdisciplinary links with research areas in which empirical progress has been made. One such area is the field of morality, which has recently seen a great resurgence in empirical interest in how emotions guide people’s moral choices. Although some argue that spiritual factors might not be open to being fully studied by traditional scientific methods (e.g., Biberman & Tischler, 2008), we disagree. A noted by others (Miller & Thorensen, 2003), many unobservable psychological phenomena have been empirically studied with established methods with great success, such as implicit cognitive processes, emotional feelings, and, as we will review, THE CLEAN CONSCIENCE AT WORK 2