08/25/2022
By Mary Lou Kelly

The Department of Management at the Robert J. Manning School of Business invites you to attend a Dissertation Proposal Defense by David Greenway on "The Lived Experience of Moral Injury in Organizations."

Doctoral Candidate: David A. Greenway
Doctoral Concentration: Leadership & Organization Studies (Department of Management)
Defense Date: Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2022
Time: 1:30 – 3 p.m.
Location: Carter Conference Room, PTB205, and via Zoom
Dissertation Title: The Lived Experience of Moral Injury in Organizations

Dissertation Chair: Erica Steckler, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Management, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

Dissertation Committee Members:

  • Kimberly Merriman, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Management, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
  • David Wasieleski, Ph.D., Albert Paul Viragh Professor of Business Ethics, Duquesne University

Abstract:
Contemporary organizational life presents a seemingly never-ending stream of situations that challenge an individual’s moral convictions. Competitive pressures, resources limitations, and performance mandates have contributed to conditions in which individuals are exposed to transgressive acts due to harmful organizational policies and practices, corruption and wrongdoing or the experience of betrayal by individual(s) or institution(s) they once trusted. Individuals may also find that their own behavior has at times fallen short of the moral expectations they have for themselves. While academics and philosophers have long sought to understand “why good people do bad things” (i.e., transgressive acts), considerably less attention has been paid to the personal experience and lasting effects of such ‘bad things’ – i.e., the human cost of one’s own or others’ moral transgressions – what is described as moral injury. Moral injury is experienced as a “wound to the soul” and lasting psychological, biological, social, and spiritual outcomes caused by the commission (or omission) of immoral acts, the witnessing of the immoral acts of others, or the experience of betrayal. This proposed qualitative phenomenological study is designed to better understand the lived experience of moral injury in organizational life, including how the nature of self and other transgressions, as well as individual and situational influences, affects an individual’s sense of self and shapes how they move through the organizational world they inhabit.