Organizational Storytelling, Ethics and Morality : How Stories Frame Limits of Behavior in Organizations

Abstract

In this article it is argued that codes of conduct may be a starting point in examining the ethics of a business organization, but a deeper understanding of the ethics and morality of a firm may be found in the stories that circulate from employee to employee and, more specifically, from one generation of employees to another. The search for the basis of a firm’s stance on how employees should implicitly respond to both external and internal conflicts should begin with determining the “genesis” story of the firm, the primary organizational metaphor that is derived from that narrative, and how both the master narrative and metaphor frame employees’ organizational self-perception and their responses and subsequent actions in dealing with internal and external conflict.