Character and Environment : The Status of Virtues in Organizations

A recent challenge on virtue-based ethical theories holds that character does not exist. Using evidence from experimental social psychology, a number of Situationist psychologists, philosophers and organizational scholars claim that character traits do not exist and, hence, that virtue ethics is empirically inadequate. In this paper, I systematically address this challenge about the existence, status and properties of character traits and their manifestations in human behavior, with the ultimate goal of responding to the question whether virtue ethicists need to abandon the very enterprise of building a character- based moral theory in business organizations. In the course of this paper, I shall defend the claim that the Situationist argument relies on a misinterpretation of the experimental evidence