6 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW FALL 2019 SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
The 2019 Richard Beckhard
Memorial Prize
The editors of MIT Sloan Management Review are pleased to announce the winner
of this year’s Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize, awarded to the most outstanding
MIT SMR article on planned change and organizational development published
from our winter 2018 through fall 2018 issues.
THIS YEAR’S AWARD goes to the fall 2018 MIT SMR article “Building an Ethically Strong Organization”
by Catherine Bailey and Amanda Shantz. The article examines why persistent unethical conduct occurs and
what managers can do about it, a topic that the judges felt was especially relevant today in the wake of several
recent cases of large-scale corporate misconduct, with a significant number of business leaders under fire.
Bailey, a professor of work and employment at King’s
Business School at King’s College London, and Shantz, an
associate professor in human resource management and or-
ganizational behavior at Trinity Business School at Trinity
College Dublin, studied corporate ethical behavior through
field research that included surveys, interviews, focus groups,
and in-depth case studies of five organizations in the United
Kingdom. They found that an organization’s ethical tone
was determined by how employees addressed common
dilemmas in their everyday work and that doing the right
thing was not always the most expedient or profitable
approach. Handling dilemmas in the right way, they con-
cluded, requires management to acknowledge ethically
ambiguous situations, clarify the trade-offs, model the
desired behaviors, create and enforce robust corporate poli-
cies and procedures, empower employees to speak up when
breaches occur, and embrace a higher purpose that tran-
scends self-interest. “By openly acknowledging and carefully
managing murky situations that come up again and again,”
the authors write, “organizations become much less suscep-
tible to egregious lapses in judgment — and less likely to
incur the associated reputational and financial costs.”
Richard Beckhard, the judges say, would have been greatly
disturbed by recent examples of ethical misconduct, and in
their view, “he would have been pleased with the authors’
findings that ethical organizations require ethical leadership — not just at the top but at all levels — and that
this, in turn, requires a strong vision and a deep commitment to all stakeholders.”
Our panel of judges consisted of the following distinguished members of the MIT Sloan School of Man-
agement faculty: Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management John Van Maanen, professor of the practice
Zeynep Ton, and retired senior lecturer Cyrus Gibson.RICHARD
BECKHARD
One of the founders and
architects of the field of
organizational development,
professor Richard Beckhard
was a member of the MIT
Sloan School of Manage-
ment faculty for more than
20 years. A longtime friend
of MIT Sloan Management
Review, Beckhard was
known for his efforts to
help organizations function
in a more humane and
high-performing manner
and to empower people
to be agents of change.
His books include
Organizational Develop-
ment: Strategies and
Models; Organizational
Transitions: Managing
Complex Change; Chang-
ing the Essence: The Art
of Creating and Leading
Fundamental Change
in Organizations; and
his autobiography, Agent
of Change: My Life,
My Practice.
The prize was estab-
lished in 1984 by the faculty
of the MIT Sloan School of
Management upon profes-
sor Beckhard’s retirement,
and it was renamed the
Richard Beckhard Memorial
Prize after his death on
Dec. 28, 1999.
The Winners
Catherine Bailey and
Amanda Shantz
Authors of:
“Building an Ethically Strong
Organization,”
MIT Sloan Management Review,
Volume 60, No. 1 (fall 2018): 75-
Reprint 60101