| This qualitative study investigates how corporate managers view ethics, and to what extent their views are influenced by their socialization. Three male and three female managers comprised this voluntary sample. The researcher used the managers' experiences as mirrors to confirm or disconfirm his own ethical experiences. The concepts extracted were collected and analyzed from a phenomenological perspective. A literature review provided a background for the implications of the study.; Previous research reveals that corporate culture reflects a masculine ethic which determines how managers behave. Power, for example, is acquired or possessed to control outcomes. Prior research also indicates that in an ecological, or systems age, managers must see power as not only control, but also as an infinite source of creativity.; This study reveals that the managers interviewed, like the researcher, had an awareness of power being used rationally, to control. However, they had no awareness or appreciation of power as the infinite source of creativity. Utilizing all one's powers, as Fromm's studies reveal, is an ethical process and an art. Such a socialization process involves not only the male, left brain skills of reason and logic, but also involves the female, intuitive powers of the unconscious.; As demonstrated in this study, managers in a systems age will no longer see a masculine mechanistic world, but an interactive world. Like a hologram, the managers are the corporation, the business system and humanity. Therefore, what happens ethically with the individual, simultaneously affects the ethics of the part (corporation and business system) and the ethics of the whole (humanity). Acting ethically in the modern corporation, will involve managers utilizing all their masculine and feminine powers, with appreciation being acknowledged as the infinite source of all power. This ethical process, as the study reveals, will transform the individual, the corporation and humanity. |
