Executive Summary

Background

This is the first study to investigate how relationships among a project manager, team members, and stakeholders bring about ethical or personal conflicts for project managers (Aaltonen & Sivonen, 2009; Jepsen & Eskerod, 2009). This study also examines the impact of these relationships on ethical and social responsibility decision making. A literature is growing concerning the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) considerations (Laschinger, Brent, & Claasen, 2005) as well as ethical issues for projects (Jonasson & Ingason, 2013). In addition, many project management textbooks as well as professional standards now contain sections relating to ethical practice (Schwalbe, 2011; Sears, Sears, & Clough, 2013). More recently, the significance of these topic areas has resulted in the Project Management Institute (PMI) funding research projects looking at project management and sustainability (Gareis, Huemann, Martinuzzi, Sedlacko, & Weninger, 2013) as well as reexamining new thinking in the area of stakeholder management (e.g., Eskerod, Huemann, & Ringhofer, 2015). The term responsible leadership has gained currency in the literature as denoting leadership that combines an emphasis on both ethical behaviors and social responsibility concerns (Maak & Pless, 2006a, 2006b).

To date, limited empirical research has been conducted examining responsible leadership in action, and we have only a shallow understanding of how managers’ leadership actions interact with ethical judgments or CSR concerns (De Hoogh & Den Hartog, 2008; Pless, 2007), especially in the case of project management. There is reason to believe that projects might actually impose some constraints on this form of leadership. Most project managers learn that success is about delivering projects on time and on budget (Lock, 1987; Wright, 1997). Do the consensual solutions that represent the sine qua non of responsible leadership thus pose problems for traditional approaches to project management? Further, the use of cost-benefit analysis as a decision-making tool by project managers has been criticized because it fails to take into account ethical considerations (Van Wee, 2012). This study offers new and original insights on the nature of personal, value, and ethical dilemmas faced by project managers and the factors that influence how they make ethical or value-related decisions. Given the paucity of empirical research in the area of ethical decision making and responsible leadership, the findings from this study will have implications for leadership in projects and ethical decision making more widely.

The Study

We conducted a qualitative study and undertook semi-structured interviews with project team members and their stakeholders based in a major United Kingdom–based insurance business. The study was longitudinal and we collected data from four projects over the course of 12 months to gain a better understanding of the dynamic nature of decision-making processes and the contextual factors that influence them.

Key Findings

Although all four projects studied were found to deal with issues that have ethical or moral dimensions exemplified by value conflicts, project members tended not to see these issues as ethical ones. Cognitive models of decision making, such as the one put forward by Rest (1986), emphasize moral awareness as an essential first key step in the ethical decision-making process. Our findings, however, suggest that in organizational settings, these personal value conflicts are interpreted through the lens of the organization's culture and business priorities such that ethical issues are not explicitly seen as such.

How project members engage in ethical decision making does not fit well with a rationalist approach to understanding the ethical decision-making process. Rest (1986), for example, posits a four-step model of ethical decision making and behavior that characterizes ethical decision making as proceeding through four stages: (1) moral awareness, (2) moral judgment, (3) moral intent, and (4) moral behavior. Instead, our findings suggest that how project members viewed a moral dilemma shifted as time progressed and their interpretations of a situation varied as different events unfolded during the course of a project.

The moral intensity of an issue or problem was found to vary over time as project members interacted with different people and situations. These served as “trigger” events that resulted in project members interpreting or reinterpreting the moral dilemma in different ways. These trigger events were found to provoke cognitive dissonance, which resulted in a series of ongoing rationalizations or legitimization processes to justify the perspective of the situation taken. This suggests that ethical decision making is more akin to a sensemaking process in real-life organizational settings rather than a sequential, rational, cognitive analysis of a moral dilemma.

The organizational culture was found to play a significant role in this sensemaking process. This culture was characterized as being paternalistic and caring, although risk averse. A core value of this organization was “serving our members (customers).” This resulted in decision-making processes being driven by the need for consensus involving a number of stakeholders. Consensus building meant establishing shared mental models that influenced how project members interpreted moral issues in their projects.

Consensus building meant that high levels of stakeholder engagement and management were a distinctive aspect of the decision-making process in these projects. This led to greater accountability for decision making and the notion that decision making was shared or dispersed across a wide network of key actors. This played a significant role in shaping how project members interpreted ethical dilemmas and their subsequent actions.

History in terms of the relative success and experience of previous projects in the organization was a major lens through which project members made sense of and interpreted ethical issues and gave meaning to moral situations that arose on projects.

Ethical situations arose on projects where conflicts were experienced between project and organizational priorities and unclear boundaries of project members’ roles and responsibilities. In these circumstances, the project's governance structure was used to help resolve ethical issues that arose. However, this could involve significant politicking and the selected lobbying of particular stakeholders in order to secure particular decision outcomes. This, again, suggests that ethical decision making was far less a cognitive, rational process than it was subject to actors persuading and cajoling powerful others to secure outcomes that supported their priorities.

Ethical decision making is a core aspect of responsible leadership, but rational approaches to ethical decision making suggest individuals will judge moral situations in terms of absolute moral standards or universal principles. Our findings suggest that ethical decision making in projects and organizations does not mirror this rationalistic perspective. Instead, ethical decision making is a dynamic process where individuals negotiate and make sense of moral situations through interactions with key stakeholders, and engage in a continuous process of interpretation and reinterpretation of the issue as events unfold. This sensemaking would seem highly dependent upon contextual factors in the organization, including the organizational culture.

Contributions to Theory

This study makes a contribution to the literatures on both ethical decision making and responsible leadership as well as to project management literature.

In many studies of ethical decision making, there is a focus on a normative approach to considerations of ethics rather than exploration as an enacted phenomenon. In reviewing the literature on ethical decision making, we found a focus on rational models (e.g., Jones, 1991; Rest, 1986). However, these have been critiqued as they fail to take account of the high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity that are faced in many contexts and the related emotional aspects of decisions. Sonenshein (2007) developed a model that takes account of these additional factors, adopting a sensemaking perspective (Weick, 1995). However, to date there have been relatively few empirical studies that have tested this approach. This study provides empirical data that provide support for the Sonenshein (2007) model and, in particular, shows that a sensemaking perspective (Weick, 1995) plays a significant role in the issue-construction component of the model.

In recent years, there has been growing attention to ethics studies in the project management literature (Müller, 2014). However, these studies have tended to be somewhat limited in scope and lack evidence of the practice behaviors of project managers (Loo, 2002; Müller, 2014; Walker & Lloyd-Walker, 2014). This study provides insights into the behavior and actions of both project managers and team members in the course of working on significant projects. Furthermore, the practices, behaviors, and ethical issues are studied on a longitudinal basis, demonstrating how the impacts of a range of factors on ethical issues and decisions play out over the course of the project.

Within the literature on ethical decision making and ethics in projects, there have been assertions that organizational culture is a factor that impacts decisions and behaviors (Ho, 2010; Sweeney, Arnold, & Pierce, 2010). However, there is limited empirical evidence underpinning these assertions. This study provides evidence of the central role that organizational culture plays in the ethical decision-making process and in resolving issues and dilemmas. Responsible leadership remains an emerging concept that suffers from definitional disagreements and a lack of guidance in terms of moving from theory to application in practice (Maak & Pless, 2006a; Voegtlin, 2015).

Within our study, we found evidence that responsible leadership plays a significant role in the practical context of managing complex and ambiguous projects. In particular, we have demonstrated that extensive stakeholder engagement plays a significant role in contributing to handling ethical issues and dilemmas.

Contributions to Practice

Given the paucity of empirical research in the area of ethical decision making and responsible leadership, the findings from this study will have implications for leadership in projects—and more widely. The outcomes of this research will enable PMI to consider in what ways ethical standards of practice meet the requirements for project management practice. Furthermore, the findings can inform the development of project managers by providing input that can develop awareness of how context and moral intensity might influence the decisions project managers make on projects.

The significance of a sensemaking approach to ethical decision making provides a basis for developing project managers’ understanding of the sensemaking processes, thus enhancing their understanding of approaches to handling ethical dilemmas and decision making.