2024

Shatilova, Irina

Modern business organizations are expected to adhere to ethical standards while confronting complex challenges in their daily operations. This doctoral dissertation focuses on the virtuousness of a business organization, using the Aristotelian virtue theory as the framework to examine an organization’s ethicality in practice. Specifically, its concentration on the virtues of employee empowerment. Employee empowerment is an integral part of human flourishing, comprising a central purpose of business organizations practicing virtues. Despite the growing popularity of promoting employee empowerment its ethical dimension has remained unclear. This dissertation sheds light on this dimension. This dissertation seeks to enhance our comprehension of the organizational virtues of employee empowerment in business organizations. It accomplishes this aim through three key tasks: (1) clarifying the concept of organizational virtue through a literature analysis, (2) demonstrating a link between the Aristotelian virtue theory and employee empowerment, and (3) conducting an empirical investigation of the topic through a qualitative case study in multicultural business organizations. In the empirical part, the following research questions are answered: Which organizational virtues experienced by organization members in the case organizations are significant for employee empowerment? Which organizational vices constrain the case organizations’ virtuousness for employee empowerment to occur as experienced by the organization members? Which organizational practices experienced by the organization members in the case organizations are crucial for the virtues of employee empowerment to take place? How do organizational virtues of employee empowerment affect the human flourishing of the employees as experienced by the organization members? Semi-structured and open-ended interviews were conducted with 41 members from two multicultural business organizations in Finland, and the data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The literature analysis suggests that an organizational virtue reflects the organization's moral excellence, shaped through cooperation among its members. Rather than a universal list, virtues should be defined in relation to specific phenomena, like employee empowerment in this dissertation research. The literature analysis, viewed through an Aristotelian virtue theory lens, showed that employee empowerment is a worthy subject for empirical investigation from an ethical standpoint. The results of the empirical study theorized seven significant virtues and related vices of employee empowerment. Moreover, important organizational practices for the virtues were analyzed and conceptualized. Finally, the effects that can support the employees’ flourishing at the workplace were revealed. This dissertation enriches understanding of organizational ethics from the selected viewpoint by offering an in-depth analysis of its topic.