Social Irresponsibility in Management

direction is in agreement with the previously cited evidence; younger managers tend to be more
irresponsible.

The Stakeholder Role: Consideration was given to ways in which the role perceptions of the subject
might be modified. The first step was to ask subjects about these perceptions. A “managerial orientation
questionnaire” (MOQ) was administered to a subset of the subjects both before and after the role-
playing exercise. The MOQ described the stockholder and stakeholder roles as they were presented in
the role-playing instructions. Before the role-playing, the subjects were asked. “Which of these
descriptions best represents the role which you feel that you would use as a manager?” The results
(summarized in Table 4) were inconsistent with the assumption that subjects would normally adopt the
stockholder role. Only 21% of the respondents said that they would use the stockholder role, while
76% said they would use the stakeholder role.

After the role-playing, but before any discussion, the same subjects were given the same scale and
asked to “Mark the category that best represents how you feel that you acted in this role-playing
case.” The responses are summarized in Table 5. All group’s averages moved toward the stockholder
end of the continuum, indicating that the respondents felt that their behavior in this case was more
oriented toward the stockholder role than were their attitudes. Note, however, that the change in the
stockholder version of the case was greater than that in the control group, which, in turn, was greater
than that in the two stakeholder versions. Although the role manipulations did have the intended effect,
the magnitude of the effect was not large. Subjects bring a perception of their role into the case that is
not easily changed.

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