Caught between a rock and a hard place: how project practitioners navigate ethical tensions in decision-making
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose While project practitioners confront a minefield of misbehaviours, ethical decision-making remains insufficiently understood. Ethical tensions prevail particularly in Africa since project management education and training are based on Western philosophies, yet decision-making styles are influenced by traditional beliefs. Thus, it is unclear whether project practitioners manage consistently with their traditional cultures or with what they are taught or strike a compromise or otherwise. This paper investigates how ethical dimensions of project practitioners affect their decision-making styles. Design/methodology/approach Seven thought experiments were posed to 148 South African project practitioners to determine whether their ethical space (a combination of deontology, consequentialism and ubuntu ethics) influences their decision-making style (normative, behavioural/descriptive or prescriptive preference). Findings The results reveal that there is no dominant ethical space, but the preferred decision-making style is normative, i.e. decisions focus on what should be done. Due to their education and training, which are influenced by Western thinking, project practitioners in South Africa pull from both their Western and African belief systems. Originality/value The paper provides a novel framework grounded in the business ethics literature, which we coin the “ethical space of the decision-maker”, in which a project manager navigates ethical tensions in different circumstances. The paper sheds light on the potential relationship between the ethical space of a decision-maker and their decision-making style. It suggests that project practitioners who understand their ethical space can contextually utilise it as a guiding framework for their choices and actions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.036 | 0.062 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".