Chapter 14: Appreciative Inquiry and Ethical Awareness: Encouraging Morally Driven Organizational Goals

This chapter describes how appreciative inquiry (AI) can be used to encourage greater ethical awareness within an organization. The value of this chapter is its focus on the organizational environment within which ethical considerations occur, rather than on the specific character or cognitive processes of individuals. An ethical organization can be a significant influence on its members to develop their own ethics. AI encourages conversations that bring alignment between personal ethics and an organization’s moral purpose (Van Vuuren & Crous, 2005). We will describe how AI was used by the second author in the Brazilian organization FIESP (a Portuguese acronym for the Federation of Industries for the State of São Paulo) to create momentum for work on the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).