Overview: Virtue Ethics and Managerial Control

In the last three decades business ethics has gained an increasing popularity among academics. Moreover, in recent years, virtue-related concepts have been of considerable interest to philosophers, psychological researchers, and practitioners in the business ethics field and several approaches to character traits have been used to incorporate ethics into organizations. Virtue ethics emphasizes integrity at a personal, business, and community level and aims at developing a virtuous character of the acting subject in order to improve the trustworthy relationship to the different stakeholders. Within the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) context, integrity is connected to entrepreneurs and managers’ motivations that drive toward an intrinsic orientation. Coherently, approaches focussed on intrinsic motivation toward sustainability and CSR programs have been attracting the attention of the scientific, political, and business community, while a growing body of research argues for the need to address both internal and external drivers. Being that organizational practices include both a formal and an informal dimension, integrity can act a tool of managerial control based on the sharing of organizational values and virtues. Therefore, the virtue ethics perspective allows to conceptualize the normative aspects of virtuous competence that constitutes the good character of the entrepreneur/manager applied to the decision-making process, thus overcoming the limits of legal compliance programs and enhancing managerial control of behaviors.