Advancing ethics support in military organizations by designing and evaluating a value-based reflection tool

Military employees face all sorts of moral dilemmas in their work. The way they resolve these dilemmas—how they decide to act based on their moral deliberations—can have a substantial impact both on society and on their personal lives. Hence, it makes sense to support military employees in dealing with these dilemmas. Military organizations already support their personnel by adopting compliance-based approaches that focus, for instance, on enforcing moral rules. At the same time, however, they struggle to develop value-based approaches that could foster moral learning by improving employees' understanding of personal values, others' values, and their responsibility for others. Consequently, military employees are not adequately supported in their ethical decision-making when confronted with complex situations. To address this issue, drawing on a design research approach, we develop and evaluate the use of a value-based reflection tool to support military employees with their moral decision-making. The design and evaluation of the value-based reflection tool were informed by five semistructured interviews, notes on 45 joint reflection meetings with trainers, and evaluation notes of 755 participants. Our findings suggest the value-based reflection tool is a promising way to foster actors' moral competence in organizational settings by triggering the social mechanisms of reflection, empathy, and psychological safety. This study is the first to illustrate that value-based ethics support can complement compliance-based ethics support in a military organization. Furthermore, it demonstrates design research's potential to develop actionable knowledge for ethics support practices in organizations.