Abstract

This dissertation explores organizational response to ethics failure in the public service and how the organizational learning response furthers the pursuit of organizational moral autonomy. ;Literature concerning the extension of moral agency and autonomy to organizations is reviewed to demonstrate that such a broader conception of moral autonomy has been advanced. General literature concerning organizational learning is also reviewed, culminating in the synthesis of a model describing the process of organizational learning from ethics failure. ;This study then reports the results of an empirical exploration of the organizational response to ethics failure within a small sample of county health departments in the Eastern United States. This empirical work yields the preliminary conclusion that organizational learning in response to ethics failure is of a "satisficing" nature, where the sampled departments make good efforts at learning from ethics failure, but fall short of comprehensive organizational learning efforts. These learning efforts are found to proceed in a structured, logical and internally coherent fashion. ;This study also finds a moderate to strong punishment response to ethics failure in these departments, as well as some evidence of ignorance regarding the ethical implications of management problems and of the possibilities for learning from ethics failure. These non-learning responses are explored as factors contributing to the satisficing nature of the learning response. ;The organizational effort committed to the learning response is found to be moderately correlated with respondents' job related ethics education and childhood moral development activities and with the organizational measure of participation, suggesting that respondents reporting high levels of these variables may be somewhat more sensitive to the organizational responses to ethics problems, or more involved in the response itself. ;The sampled departments are found to have little or no espoused theory, embodied in various organizational documents, on whether or how they are to learn from ethics failure. Most of the espoused theory focuses upon prohibitory statements, procedural details for following the rules and provisions for punishment of infractions. This leads to the conclusion that espoused theory on the organizational learning response trails the theory-in-use