Professor Rosa Chun, Chair in Global Leadership, Reputation and Responsibility at UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School, received the prestigious Best Paper award at the 22nd International Vincentian Business Ethics (IVBEC) Conference held at the Marriott Hotel Downtown, New York on October 22nd -24th, 2015.  The title of the award winning paper is Organizational virtue and performance: An empirical study of customers and employees.  

Abstract:sting work on the appraisal of corporate social responsibility focuses predominantly on a utilitarian or duty-based rationalist assumptions. This paper assesses how organizational virtue as perceived by employees and customers affects organizational performance. Organizational virtue is defined as being a character trait of an organization which satisfies both employees (internal stakeholders) and customers (external stakeholders). This research administered 2,548 usable questionnaires to employees and customers across seven organizations. A structural equation model is tested linking the six dimensions of organizational virtue (empathy, warmth, integrity, conscientiousness, courage and zeal) to satisfaction, identification, and distinctiveness. All the links were significant, but the strongest was between virtue and identification. For employees, identification is driven most significantly by integrity, while customers’ identification with a firm is principally influenced by empathy. The results lead to a discussion of how companies may build favorable stakeholder perceptions of key dimensions of virtue which shape their identification and differentiation in the marketplace.