Moving towards virtuousness in organization: An analysis of factors affecting virtuous organizations

Abstract: , , and For years, there has been growing interest on virtues, especially in various organizations and progressive companies are exploring their impacts in generating new, holistic, healthy, and human work environments. Many firms are trying to become more sensitive to the requirements of the community and virtuous concerns such as caring, compassion, integrity and wisdom, and less interested in ideas such as efficiency, profitability and competitive advantage. In other words, most firms are going towards virtuous firms. The primary objective of this work is to detect the drivers and principal components of a virtuous firm to put virtues into practice. The study consists of two parts. In the first part, a Delphi study among the informed individuals is conducted and request them to detect the most effective drivers of virtuous firm, while in the second step, we do an exploratory factor analysis to detect the principal factors influencing virtuous organization. The data implemented in this phase include questionnaire responses. The survey distributes 750 questionnaires and collects 574 valid responses. The factor analysis empirically grouped the drivers of virtuous organization into five factors including Leadership, Human Resource, Organizational Culture, Structure and Processes and Care for Community. These five factors describe approximately 81.305% of the total variance. Finally, we ranked the principal factors extracted from factor analysis.

How to cite this paper

 Zamahani, M., Ahmadi, A., Sarlak, M & Shekari, H. (2012). Moving towards virtuousness in organization: An analysis of factors affecting virtuous organizations.Management Science Letters , 2(8), 2889-2902.

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