Resumo

Some could argue “What do we need the OD concept for? Aren’t Organizational Ethics and Corporate Social Responsibility concepts strong enough to discuss the relationship between organizations and stakeholders?” Organizational Ethics has been translated as Corporate Social Responsibility (Davidson & Griffin, 2000). OD treats the consequences of the actions that are carried out by organizations for the dignity of their stakeholders that can only be evaluated by them.

This work aims to present an Organizational Dignity (OD) theory. Dignity has been studied until today regarding the internal organizational environment. Nonetheless, all of the stakeholders can be affected by the organizations and they are able to evaluate them and act toward them. The main question that drove the construction of OD theory was “what do stakeholders analyze when they evaluate the consequences of the actions that are carried out by organizations for their dignity?

Considering the different dignity aspects, OD is the dignity of an organization which is reflected in their values and practices and it is more or less oriented for stakeholder’s interests, justified by deontological or teleological ethics and this ethics is evaluated in terms of moral, legal or pragmatic standards by the stakeholders that exert direct or indirect influence on it. This concept has four facets: cultural elements, focus on these elements, ethical justification and standards of OD

The OD theory was developed based on Facet Theory. Facet Theory claims that the concept needs to come before measurement. It comprises a set of tools that support theory development: mapping sentences, facets and variables relationships structure. Regional hypotheses based on the item profiles were tested by reanalyzing a comprehensive data set of 407 employees. Ordinal and interval MDS analyses were applied to the correlation matrix.

Two of the four OD facets could be clearly identified. Cultural elements – Facet A – were clearly separated with values in the center and practices around in a modular space partitions. Facet C – Ethics was also perfectly delineated in the space. Facet B – Focus has been partially identified. Some items related to social focus were misplaced together with personal focus. In the Facet D – Standards of OD items of legal standards and items of pragmatic standards were perfectly placed.

The four facets proposed for OD construct were found. The main question that drove this work could be answered: Stakeholders evaluate the consequences of the actions that are carried out by organizations for their dignity in terms of cultural elements (practices supported by values); ethics orientation (deontological or teleological); focus (more oriented for personal or social focus (stakeholders focus), and classifying the OD of an organization from high to low, as moral, legal or pragmatic

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