RT Article
T1 How to evaluate managerial nudges
JF Journal of business ethics
VO 182
IS 4
SP 1073
OP 1086
A1 Rozeboom, Grant J.
LA English
PB Springer Science + Business Media B. V
YR 2023
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1837425620
AB A central reason to worry that managers should not use nudges to influence employees is that doing so fails to treat employees as rational and/or autonomous (RA). Recent nudge defenders have marshaled a powerful line of response against this worry: in general, nudges treat us as the kind of RA agents we are, because nudges are apt to enhance our limited capacities for RA agency by improving our decision-making environments. Applied to managerial nudges, this would mean that when managers nudge their employees, they generally bolster their employees' limited RA agency and, thus, treat employees as the kinds of RA agents they are. My aim is to vindicate a qualified version of the initial worry from the nudge-defender response and, as a result, provide a clearer, more plausible framework for evaluating managerial nudges than what nudge critics have previously given. I do this, first, by showing how nudge defenders rely on equivocation between two different senses of "treating someone as RA." The value-preserving notion that supports the nudge-defender prescription to protect and enhance RA capacities is different from the authority-recognizing notion that underwrites the initial worry about nudging. Second, I argue that the authority-recognizing notion of treating someone as RA implies that managerial nudges treat employees as RA just when the nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals. Third, I explain how, to determine when managerial nudges are compatible with relating to employees as equals, we need to consider how employees surrender aspects of their equal, agency-grounded authority to managers.
K1 Autonomy
K1 Managerial authority
K1 Managerial nudges
K1 Rationality
K1 relational equality
K1 Aufsatz in Zeitschrift
DO 10.1007/s10551-021-05005-w