Growth Through Ethical Role Identity Work: The Case of Ethics and Compliance Officers

Niki A. Nieuwenboer (), Linda K. Treviño (), Derron Bishop (), Glen E. Kreiner () and Chad Murphy ()
Additional contact information
Niki A. Nieuwenboer: The University of Kansas School of Business
Linda K. Treviño: Smeal College of Business Administration, The Pennsylvania State University
Derron Bishop: Rollins College of Business, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga
Glen E. Kreiner: David Eccles School of Business, The University of Utah
Chad Murphy: College of Business, Oregon State University

Journal of Business Ethics, 2025, vol. 198, issue 1, No 5, 85-106

Abstract: Abstract Ethics and compliance officers (ECOs) are organizational agents who are responsible for ensuring employees’ ethical and legally compliant behavior. In their ethical organizational roles, ECOs impose ethical expectations on others. In our study, we find that doing so provokes a challenging interpersonal dual threat dynamic where ECOs are perceived as threatening and feel threatened in return, which is a dynamic that ECOs must navigate to be successful. To better understand how ECOs navigate this dynamic, we explore the ethical role identity work that ECOs engage in and demonstrate how ECOs make sense of and respond to the threat dynamic that occurs as they enact their roles. We found two types of identity work: (1) tensions that pull role incumbents toward personalized or impersonalized approaches in their interactions with others and (2) tactics that address the threats and tensions. We also find that ECOs’ identity work facilitates ethical and identity growth for the role incumbent. To make these contributions, we employ grounded theory methods and draw primarily upon a rich qualitative dataset of interviews with ethics and compliance officers. The model we derived from our research contributes to the behavioral ethics literature by illustrating the challenges yet growth possible in enacting ethical organizational roles.

Keywords: Ethics and compliance officers; Behavioral ethics; Ethical organizational roles; Ethical role identity work (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-024-05816-7 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:198:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1007_s10551-024-05816-7

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-024-05816-7

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().