PROFESSIONAL SOCIALIZATION OF ENGINEERS:

MORAL FORMATION AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

by
Dayoung Kim

A Dissertation
Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

School of Engineering Education

West Lafayette, Indiana
August 2022
THE PURDUE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL
STATEMENT OF COMMITTEE APPROVAL

Dr. Brent K. Jesiek, Co-chair

School of Engineering Education

Dr. Michael C. Loui, Co-chair

School of Engineering Education

Dr. Ruth A. Streveler

School of Engineering Education

Dr. Louis Tay

Department of Psychological Sciences

Approved by:
Dr. Allison F. Godwin

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work could not be done without the endless support of my academic co-advisors Drs.
Brent K. Jesiek and Michael C. Loui and my dissertation committee members Drs. Ruth A.
Streveler and Louis Tay. I also thank Drs. Andrew O. Brightman, Carla B. Zoltowski, Justin L.
Hess, Nicholas D. Fila, Alison J. Kerr, Stephanie A. Claussen, Shiloh J. Howland, and Joseph R.
Herkert, as well as members of the GEEC research group, ENE community, and anyone who
inspired and supported me outside of my work.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................................... 7

LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ 8
ABSTRACT.................................................................................................................................... 9
DISSERTATION OVERVIEW .......................................................................... 11
1.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 11
1.2 Chapter Overview ............................................................................................................. 12
1.3 Acknowledgments............................................................................................................. 14
PROMOTING PROFESSIONAL SOCIALIZATION: A SYNTHESIS OF
DURKHEIM, KOHLBERG, HOFFMAN, AND HAIDT FOR PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
EDUCATION 15
2.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 15
2.2 Psychosocial Theories of Morality ................................................................................... 17
2.2.1 Durkheim’s perspective on morality and moral education ........................................ 17
2.2.2 Kohlberg’s moral development theory ...................................................................... 19
2.2.3 Hoffman’s theory of moral internalization ................................................................ 20
2.2.4 Haidt’s social intuitionist model and moral foundations theory ................................ 21
2.3 Synthesis of Durkheim, Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt .................................................. 22
2.4 A New Conceptual Framework for Professional Socialization ........................................ 24
2.4.1 Culture and social discipline ...................................................................................... 26
2.5 Implications for Professional Ethics Education ................................................................ 28
2.5.1 Example of engineering ethics education .................................................................. 28
2.6 Limitations ........................................................................................................................ 32
2.7 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 32
2.8 Acknowledgments............................................................................................................. 33
POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS OF
ENGINEERING PROFESSIONALS IN THE UNITED STATES ............................................. 34
3.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 34
3.2 Literature Review.............................................................................................................. 35

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 3.2.1 Political ideology ....................................................................................................... 35
3.2.2 Political ideology in occupations ............................................................................... 36
3.2.3 Moral foundations theory .......................................................................................... 38
3.3 Methods............................................................................................................................. 39
3.3.1 Data collection ........................................................................................................... 39
Measures. ............................................................................................................................. 39
Participants. ......................................................................................................................... 40
3.3.2 Data analysis .............................................................................................................. 41
3.4 Results ............................................................................................................................... 44
3.5 Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 51
3.6 Limitations and Future Work ............................................................................................ 54
3.7 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 55
3.8 Acknowledgments............................................................................................................. 56
IMPACT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND PERSONALITY TRAITS
ON THE POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES AND MORAL FOUNDATIONS OF ENGINEERS ...... 57
4.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 57
4.2 Literature Review.............................................................................................................. 58
4.2.1 Relationships between personality traits and political ideology ................................ 59
4.2.2 Moral foundations’ relationships with personality traits and political ideology ....... 60
4.2.3 Cultural influence ...................................................................................................... 61
4.2.4 Moral personality ....................................................................................................... 63
4.3 Research Questions ........................................................................................................... 64
4.4 Methods............................................................................................................................. 65
4.4.1 Data collection ........................................................................................................... 65
Measures. ............................................................................................................................. 65
Participants. ......................................................................................................................... 67
4.4.2 Data analysis .............................................................................................................. 68
4.5 Results ............................................................................................................................... 70
4.6 Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 77
4.7 Implications....................................................................................................................... 80
4.8 Limitations and Future Work ............................................................................................ 81

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 4.9 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 82
4.10 Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................... 82
MORAL NARRATIVES OF PRACTICING ENGINEERS.............................. 83
5.1 Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 83
5.2 Literature Review.............................................................................................................. 83
5.2.1 Moral narratives ......................................................................................................... 83
5.2.2 Engineering and moral narratives .............................................................................. 85
5.3 Methodology ..................................................................................................................... 86
5.3.1 Narrative inquiry and ethnographic interviewing ...................................................... 86
5.3.2 Interview protocol ...................................................................................................... 87
5.3.3 Participant recruitment and demographics ................................................................ 88
5.3.4 Data analysis .............................................................................................................. 90
5.4 Results ............................................................................................................................... 90
Narrative 1: Sophia.............................................................................................................. 91
Narrative 2: Olivia ............................................................................................................... 92
Narrative 3: Graham ............................................................................................................ 94
Narrative 4: Margaret .......................................................................................................... 95
5.5 Discussion ......................................................................................................................... 98
5.6 Conclusions ....................................................................................................................... 99
5.7 Acknowledgments............................................................................................................. 99
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK ....................................................... 100
6.1 Conclusions ..................................................................................................................... 100
6.2 Future Work .................................................................................................................... 102
APPENDIX A. SURVEY ITEMS .............................................................................................. 104
APPENDIX B. CHAPTER 3 ADDITIONAL ANALYSES ...................................................... 126
APPENDIX C. CHAPTER 4 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ............................................... 127
APPENDIX D. INTERVIEW PROTOCOL............................................................................... 128
APPENDIX E. EXAMPLE MORAL NARRATIVES ............................................................... 131
APPENDIX F. RECRUITMENT MESSAGE AND CONSENT FORM .................................. 137
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 141
VITA ........................................................................................................................................... 153

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 LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.1. Summary of the Comparison between Durkheim, Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt. ... 23
Table 3.1. Participant Demographic Information (n=515) ........................................................... 41
Table 3.2. Dummy Codded Independent Variables ...................................................................... 42
Table 3.3. Results of Brant Test.................................................................................................... 43
Table 3.4. Results of Brant Test.................................................................................................... 44
Table 3.5. Mean and Standard Deviation of Political Ideology .................................................... 45
Table 3.6. Results of Partial Proportional Odds Model ................................................................ 47
Table 3.7. Results of Multiple Linear Regression Analyses ......................................................... 48
Table 3.8. Results of Partial Proportional Odds Model ................................................................ 50
Table 4.1. Participant Demographic Information (N=515) .......................................................... 68
Table 4.2. Bivariate Correlation between Moral Foundations, Big Five Personality Traits, and
Political Ideology .......................................................................................................................... 71
Table 4.3. Results of Moderation Analysis with Clan Culture ..................................................... 72
Table 4.4. Results of Moderation Analysis with Adhocracy Culture ........................................... 72
Table 4.5. Results of Moderation Analysis with Market Culture ................................................. 73
Table 4.6. Results of Moderation Analysis with Hierarchy Culture............................................. 73
Table 4.7. Results of Moderation Analysis ................................................................................... 75
Table 5.1. Demographic Information of the Interviewees of the Four Narratives Introduced in this
Paper ............................................................................................................................................. 89

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 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1. The relationship between thinkers addressed in this paper. ....................................... 17
Figure 2.2. The process of moral formation, a significant part of professional socialization. 1: the
relationship between individual characteristics and behaviors. 2: moral formation process. 3:
influence of social discipline on one’s change process. 4: feedback from nascent professionals’
behavior on the contents of social discipline. 5: feedback from socialized individuals’ critical
reflection. 6: balance between cognitive and affective components in social discipline. ............. 25
Figure 3.1. Density plot of political ideology by sector (a), age (b), gender (c), race (d), position
(e), and combined sector (f). Cautious interpretation would be needed for small groups including
Sector – Retail, Consulting, Food, Transportation, Government; and Gender – Others. ............. 45
Figure 4.1. Competing Values Framework (from Cameron & Quinn, 2011)............................... 62
Figure 4.2. Hypothesized Model of the Relationships across Personality Traits, Moral Foundations,
and Political Ideology, embedded in Organizational Culture ....................................................... 64
Figure 4.3. A graphical representation of the model I tested. While not depicted, there were two
moral foundations (Individualizing and Binding), and four organizational cultures (Clan,
Adhocracy, Market, and Hierarchy), and each combination of those variables was tested separately.
....................................................................................................................................................... 69
Figure 4.4. A graphical representation of the model I tested. While not depicted, there were four
organizational cultures (Clan, Adhocracy, Market, and Hierarchy), and moderating effects of each
culture type were tested separately. .............................................................................................. 70
Figure 4.5. A visual representation of how the effect of Agreeableness on the endorsement of the
Binding foundation is moderated by (a) Market culture and (b) Hierarchy culture. The black dots
signify lower (16th percentile), medium (50th percentile), and higher (84th percentile)
Agreeableness respectively. Low, medium, and high Market and Hierarchy cultures indicate 16th,
50th, and 84th percentile scores of Market and Hierarchy cultures respectively. ........................ 74
Figure 4.6. A visual representation of how Market culture moderates the effect of Agreeableness
on political ideology. The black dots signify lower (16th percentile), medium (50th percentile),
and higher (84th percentile) Agreeableness respectively. Low, medium, and high Market indicate
16th, 50th, and 84th percentile scores of Market culture respectively. ........................................ 75
Figure 4.7. Results from the structural equation modeling. For clarity of the presentation, the
residual variance terms are not displayed in the graphic. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001. The
paths between Binding and Loyalty and between Individualizing and Care were fixed to 1 before
standardizing the coefficients, so they are indicated as dotted lines without stars. ...................... 77

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 ABSTRACT

Novice engineers become engineering professionals through the process of professional

socialization. An important dimension of professional socialization is moral formation, and
engineering education contributes to the initial process of the moral formation of engineering
students. However, engineering ethics education has mainly focused on teaching ethical issues and
reasoning skills, and the limitation of such approaches has been often pointed out. This dissertation
is the result of the exploratory investigations to obtain insights into engineering practitioners’
moral formation, which could eventually lead to knowledge for more effectively facilitating
engineering students’ moral formation.
This dissertation consists of four independent but related studies. The first study (Chapter
2) is a theoretical study to establish a new framework for engineers’ professional socialization,
which includes moral formation. To create the framework, I synthesized the ideas of Durkheim,
Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt on moral formation, with Durkheim as a common thread, and
argued that the moral formation process is influenced and promoted by social discipline, a
collective process that utilizes cultural influences, with respect for individual differences.
The following three studies are empirical studies informed by the first theoretical study.
The second study explored the political ideologies and moral foundations of engineers in the
United States. I examined how engineers’ political ideologies are associated with their moral
foundations and how engineers’ political ideologies and moral foundations vary across their
employment sectors, organizational positions, and demographic attributes. Especially, the
comparison across different employment sectors could provide insights for ethics researchers
because the working environment, which can be informed by the dominant thoughts and attitudes
of the members of the group, could potentially inform the contents of the social discipline. The
third study examined the relationships between engineering professionals’ personality traits, moral
foundations, and political ideology, and how these interact with their workplace organizational
cultures. The knowledge about the relationships and interactions could provide insights on
deepening the understanding of individual differences in the moral formation process. The fourth
study explored engineers’ moral narratives, and I introduced four examples. The results showed
that individual engineers’ moral narratives are intertwined with their life history as a person,
although there are some different approaches to pursuing a moral life.

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 Each study in this dissertation independently contributes to enhancing the understanding
of different aspects of engineers’ moral formation, which is a complex and multifaceted process
where engineers’ individual characteristics and the culture of their organizations interact. While
the influence of organizational culture on moral behavior has been studied by business ethicists,
this dissertation appears to be the first to examine the role of organizational culture in the moral
formation of engineers. I discuss the potential opportunity to design a new pedagogy based on this
dissertation as future work.

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 DISSERTATION OVERVIEW

1.1 Introduction

Engineering education starts the career-long process of professional socialization through

which novice engineers become engineering professionals. Throughout the process, engineers
internalize norms and values of the engineering profession and embody virtues as an engineer: In
other words, engineers undergo the moral formation process, an important dimension of the
professional socialization.
However, engineering ethics scholars have often pointed out that current engineering
education programs may not prepare students well enough for ethical engineering practice
(McGinn, 2003). A potential reason could be the limitations of current pedagogical approaches to
engineering ethics, which have mainly focused on developing ethical awareness and reasoning
skills (Kim & Jesiek, 2019). Those skills may be insufficient for helping students to embody the
values and virtues associated with engineering professionals, as studies in moral psychology have
often reported a gap between one’s understanding of ethics and actual ethical behavior (Bandura,
1996). In line with such findings, recent studies in engineering ethics education also call for
complementary instruction beyond teaching reasoning (e.g., Bairaktarova & Woodcock, 2017).
Therefore, I decided to generate knowledge that can potentially help educators better facilitate
engineering students’ moral formation by focusing on the concept of moral personality (McAdams
& Pals, 2006).
Moral personality cuts across the three different levels of the personality, but it is
specifically defined in the domain of morality. According to the new Big Five model of McAdams
and Pals (2006), personality can be conceptualized as a coordination of three different levels:
dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and life narratives. Dispositional traits are individual
attributes, such as extraversion, which are relatively stable over time, and which “sketch a
behavioral outline” (2006, p. 212). Characteristic adaptations refer to a more malleable level of
personality, including goals, values, and beliefs. Life narratives are stories that express the
meaning of one’s life over time. Those three levels are additionally situated in cultural contexts.
By extension, moral personality involves a coordination of “traits, adaptations, and stories that

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best support and sustain a moral life in culture” (2006, p. 23). As an example, moral narratives, an
element of moral personality, are the stories that support and sustain one’s moral life.
While there are more and less malleable levels in moral personality, an engineer’s moral
personality develops throughout their career and is situated in engineering culture. However, not
much is known about this moral formation process. For example, we do not know much about how
the relationships between different levels of moral personality are affected by the organizational
cultures of engineering workplaces. Also, we do not know what moral narratives engineers
construct, revise, and live with throughout their career, and how those narratives are influenced by
their workplace cultures.
Dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and narratives are not independent of each
other (Haidt, 2012). Understanding the dynamics of personality development and the factors that
influence these dynamics can inform the efforts of educators to facilitate the moral formation of
individuals. Thus, I expect that better understanding of practicing engineers’ moral formation can
help engineering educators better prepare engineering students for ethical engineering practice.

1.2 Chapter Overview

Besides the overall introduction and conclusion chapters, this dissertation consists of four
chapters, each of which report a theoretical (Chapter 2) and empirical quantitative (Chapter 3 and
4) and qualitative (Chapter 5) studies respectively. While the theoretical study informs the
following empirical studies, each empirical study explores different levels of moral personality.
For example, Chapter 3 focuses on the characteristic adaptation level of moral personality. Chapter
4 focuses on the relationships between dispositional traits level and characteristic adaptations level
of moral personality. Chapter 5 focuses on the narrative level of moral personality. While each
chapter are connected through the concepts of moral formation and moral personality, each chapter
was written for an independent journal article. In particular, some text is duplicated in Chapter 3
and Chapter 4, which analyze data from the same survey of professional engineers.
In Chapter 2, I create a theoretical framework for professional socialization, which includes
moral formation. To create the framework, I synthesize the ideas of Durkheim, Kohlberg, Hoffman,
and Haidt on moral formation, with Durkheim as a common thread. In the framework, the
internalization process is influenced and promoted by social discipline, which includes both
cognitive and affective aspects. I argue that desirable social discipline can be achieved when

12
cognition and affect are well-balanced, with respect for individual differences. I provide a specific
example of engineering ethics education to illustrate how this framework can be applied to
professional education. The preliminary version of this paper received the Best Formal Paper by a
Graduate Student Award of the 2020 APPE (Association for Practical and Professional Ethics)
conference, and the final version of the paper has been published in the Business and Professional
Ethics Journal (Kim, 2022).
In Chapter 3, I report an exploratory study of the political ideologies and moral foundations
of engineers in the United States. Scholars have argued that engineering practice should be
understood in its societal context, including the political contexts in which engineers perform.
However, very few research studies have systematically explored the political and moral
backgrounds of engineering professionals, who would be the main agents of political engagement.
Based on survey responses from 515 engineers, I conducted generalized ordinal logistic regression
analyses and multiple linear regression analyses to examine how engineers’ political ideologies
are associated with their moral foundations and how engineers’ political ideologies and moral
foundations vary across their employment sectors, organizational positions, and demographic
attributes. The full paper co-authored with Dr. Brent Jesiek has been submitted for publication in
journals.
In Chapter 4, I answer four research questions related to the relationships between
engineering professionals’ personality traits, moral foundations, and political ideology, and how
these interact with their workplace organizational cultures, based on survey data from 515
engineers from various employment sectors. I utilized the Big Five Personality framework for the
personality traits, the Moral Foundations Theory to examine moral foundations, the traditional
liberal-conservative framework for political ideology, and the Competing Values Framework for
organizational culture. To answer the research questions, I examined bivariate correlations
between the variables and conducted moderated regression analyses and structural equation
modeling. The full paper co-authored with Dr. Brent Jesiek has been submitted for publication in
journals. As the Chapter 3 and 4 share the same dataset, I introduced the overview of both studies
in a short work-in-progress paper, which was published in the proceedings of the 2021 ASEE
Conference & Exposition (Kim et al., 2021b).
In Chapter 5, I report an exploratory investigation to identify some examples of moral
narrative of engineering practitioners and their research and educational implications. I utilized the

13
narrative inquiry as a methodological approach, and I interviewed 25 practicing engineers across
five employment sectors. Among the 25 narratives, in this chapter, I introduce four of them as
examples: The narratives of two early-career engineers and two senior engineers. The preliminary
version of this paper has been published in the 2021 Frontiers in Education Conference
proceedings (Kim et al., 2021a).
In Chapter 6, I summarize the major findings of this dissertation study and discuss some
future work to conclude the document. The data collected for the empirical studies will be archived
in the Purdue University Research Repository (PURR).

1.3 Acknowledgments

Portions of Section 1.1 have been excerpted and adapted from Kim, D., Jesiek, B. K., Loui,
M. C., & Huff, C. (2021b). Work in progress: Organizational culture and engineers’ moral values
across industry sectors: Study overview. Proceedings of the 2021 ASEE Conference & Exposition.
© 2021 American Society for Engineering Education. ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings, July
26-29, Virtual Meeting.

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 PROMOTING PROFESSIONAL SOCIALIZATION: A
SYNTHESIS OF DURKHEIM, KOHLBERG, HOFFMAN, AND HAIDT
FOR PROFESSIONAL ETHICS EDUCATION

Kim, D. (2022). Promoting Professional Socialization: A Synthesis of Durkheim, Kohlberg,

Hoffman, and Haidt for Professional Ethics Education. Business and Professional Ethics Journal.
41(1), pp.93-114. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5840/bpej202216115
Included by permission from the Philosophy Documentation Center (c) 2022.

2.1 Introduction

In 1980, the Hastings Center proposed that in professional education, students should be
“introduced to codes of ethics, the relationship of the professions to the values of the society, and
to the kinds of moral dilemmas that professionals meet in their daily life” (Hastings Center 1980,
30). Consistent with the recommendations of the Hastings Center, professional ethics education
has usually prioritized enhancing students’ awareness of ethical issues and improving students’
skills in ethical reasoning. For example, in engineering, accreditation criteria require that
engineering graduates demonstrate “an ability to recognize ethical and professional responsibilities
in engineering situations and make informed judgments” (ABET 2019), which require ethical
awareness and reasoning skills. In engineering ethics classes, students develop judgment by
reasoning through cases (Harris et al. 1996). Some scholars have argued, however, that the goals
of engineering ethics education should extend beyond reasoning and judgment to promoting a
sense of responsibility (Pritchard 1998) and ethical behavior (Bairaktarova and Woodcock 2017).
Outside the field of engineering, the professional ethics literature has also criticized
educators’ relatively narrow focus on cognitive skills such as applying moral theories to ethical
dilemmas. In business ethics, Simola (2012) argued that traditional approaches in business ethics
could be enhanced by acknowledging that cognitive processes are inseparable from individuals’
bodily and emotional experiences. Others also pointed out the importance of emotion (Griseri 2002;
Lurie 2004) as well as moral identity (Gu and Neesham 2014) in business ethics. Similarly,
medical ethics scholars highlighted the importance of emotion (Gillam et al. 2014) while
criticizing the primary focus on teaching reasoning and decision-making in medical ethics.

15
 While scholars of professional ethics have noticed the omission of emotion and affect from
ethics education, moral psychologists have considered both cognition and affect in moral
formation, but they disagreed on which is primary (Zajonc 1984; Lazarus 1984). Acknowledging
the importance of both cognition and affect, in this paper I will present a new conceptual
framework developed through a synthesis of Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), Lawrence Kohlberg
(1927-1987), Martin Hoffman (1950-), and Jonathan Haidt (1963-). I will discuss this framework’s
educational implications for professional ethics. I will argue that professional education starts the
process of professional socialization, and students’ moral formation is influenced by social
discipline, a process that I will describe later.
The main thread of the synthesis is Durkheim’s conception of moral formation as a
socialization process. Understanding Durkheim is very important because Kohlberg, Hoffman, and
Haidt were all influenced by Durkheim’s perspective, either accepting or rejecting it. Kohlberg’s
theory of moral development is important because current ethics education is rooted in
Kohlbergian moral psychology, which assumes cognitive primacy. In contrast, Hoffman argued
affective primacy and suggests that empathy is a key aspect of morality. Haidt argued intuitive
primacy (Haidt 2007). Intuition is a type of cognition, but it contrasts with deliberate cognition
(e.g., reasoning), which has been typically emphasized among cognitive developmentalists like
Kohlberg. Also, Haidt explains there is an overlap between intuition and emotion by saying that
the cognitive components of emotions are kinds of intuition. Haidt’s intuitive primacy is strictly
speaking cognitive primacy but also highlights the role of affect.
John Gibbs (2019) published a synthesis of Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt. In Gibbs’s
synthesis, however, Haidt’s theory is not a major element. While Gibbs briefly acknowledged
cultural influences on morality, which Haidt emphasized, Gibbs focused mainly on Kohlberg and
Hoffman’s theories for his synthesis. However, I think that Haidt’s insights about the importance
of culture and individual differences need to be highlighted in the field of professional ethics for
two reasons. First, professional socialization generally starts after individuals are already adults
and have formed their own value systems; therefore, individual differences need to be addressed.
Second, professional culture plays a major role in professional socialization; therefore, cultural
influences should be addressed. Therefore, I decided to synthesize the three thinkers’ works from
a different perspective without relying on Gibbs’s synthesis. As Durkheim perceived moral

16
formation as a socialization process, a Durkheim-based synthesis should be able to fulfill the
purpose. Figure 2.1 shows the relationships between Durkheim, Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt.

Figure 2.1. The relationship between thinkers addressed in this paper.

I will use the terms socialization and moral formation rather than autonomous moral
development throughout this paper because nascent professionals are not fully autonomous as they
become socialized as members of a profession. The results of this paper can inform the design of
instruction in professional ethics in general. To illustrate the ideas I present, however, I will
provide a specific example of engineering ethics education.

2.2 Psychosocial Theories of Morality

2.2.1 Durkheim’s perspective on morality and moral education

In the early twentieth century, as France became urbanized and secularized, Durkheim
(1925) considered the “completely rational [or secular] moral education” (19) offered by public
schools. Durkheim perceived behavior that conforms to the pre-established rules as moral. He
described the function of morality as “to determine conduct, to fix it, to eliminate the element of
individual arbitrariness” (27). He suggested three elements of morality: the spirit of discipline,
attachment to social groups, and autonomy or self-determination.

17
 The first element, the spirit of discipline, consists of two parts: regularity and authority.
Durkheim’s discipline means the process of regularizing one’s behavior through the influence of
authority, which derives from the customs of society. Note that he did not say that authority is
from a single individual. Also, he thought discipline is useful because he believed that it is the
pathway toward true liberty. As we participate in society, our lives are essentially bounded by a
limited environment. We need to live in a limited physical world and live harmoniously with the
social world that surrounds us. The function of discipline is therefore to inform us about the
restraints imposed upon us and how to control our desires. He said, “the rule, because it teaches us
to restrain and master ourselves, is a means of emancipation and of freedom” (49).
The second element, attachment to social groups, reflects his idea that morality begins
when one belongs to a group of people. Durkheim distinguished human behavior into behavior in
pursuit of personal ends (e.g., personal survival, aggrandizement, or development) and that of
impersonal ends. Durkheim suggested that only behavior that pursues impersonal ends is moral,
and impersonal ends must be supra-individual, serving “groups formed by the union of individuals,
that is to say, societies” (59).
The third element of morality is autonomy or self-determination. Durkheim thought this
element differentiates secular (or rational) morality and religious morality. When morality is
founded on a religious base, as “the law of an eternal and immutable being” (106), it becomes
something that “must be conceived as unchangeable, like the image of God” (106). However, in
an era of rapid social change, he observed that morality was also under transformation and thought
it was task of the members of the society to “create a morality” (106) for their society. He thought
that morality should be flexible enough to accommodate social change. For the question of what
rules we should accept as moral, he emphasizes raison d'être, that is, the reasons for the existence
of the rules. He thought that individuals conform to social rules because they voluntarily accept
the rules throughout rational choice.
Reflecting those three elements of morality, Durkheim said that an ideal moral education
encourages a student to “understand his country and his times, to make him feel his responsibilities,
to initiate him into life and thus to prepare him to take his part in the collective tasks awaiting him”
(124). Current approaches in moral education have developed from either criticism or defense of
Durkheim.

18
2.2.2 Kohlberg’s moral development theory

Kohlberg criticized Durkheim’s relativistic perspective on ethics. Against the idea of moral
relativism, Kohlberg argued there is “a culturally and historically universal pattern of mature moral
thought and action” (Kohlberg 1971, 25). Kohlberg found that children undergo similar patterns
of changes in reasoning, from the pre-conventional level, through the conventional level, to the
post-conventional level. In the pre-conventional level, individuals meet social expectations to
avoid punishment. In the conventional level, individuals follow rules to maintain social order. In
the post-conventional level, individuals perceive rules of the society as a result of a social contract,
and they apply universal ethical principles. Kohlberg (1971) said,
Durkheim (1925) and Dreeben (1968) assume that learning to accept rules and
authority is a concrete nonrational process… This conception of moral learning
contrasts with that of Dewey (1925) and Piaget (1932), who hold that the child
learns to accept authority genuinely when he learns to understand and accept the
reasons and principles behind the rules…. This is a very different point of view
from … [thinkers] like Durkheim, [who] assume that ‘ethical principles’ are the
accepted rules of their own nation and culture, which should be taught to children
by the teacher's deliberate instruction, example, and discipline... (32-33)

There is a significant discrepancy between what Durkheim actually argued and how Kohlberg
interpreted Durkheim. In contrasting Durkheim and Dreeben with Dewey and Piaget, Kohlberg
emphasized that Dewey and Piaget described how children accept rules genuinely when they
understand the reasons behind them. However, that is what Durkheim said. Durkheim clearly did
not encourage blindly following social rules: Durkheim emphasized the raison d'être of social rules
and responsibilities. Moreover, Durkheim’s third element of morality is autonomy or self-
determination. In summary, Kohlberg’s criticism of Durkheim is based on a misunderstanding.
In fact, Kohlberg’s theory has many similarities with Durkheim’s ideas. The progression
from the pre-conventional to the conventional level, from avoiding punishment to maintaining
social order, aligns with Durkheim’s ideas. Durkheim thought that social unity can be achieved
when individuals feel solidarity with their society and voluntarily follow social norms and rules.
Also, Durkheim’s emphasis on autonomy allows alignment with Kohlberg’s post-conventional
level. Therefore, Kohlberg does not necessarily contradict Durkheim. Of course, the idea of
cultural relativism, which most concerned Kohlberg, should be critically reviewed. Also, some
notable differences between Kohlberg and Durkheim should also be considered, including the fact

19
that Kohlberg argued that moral development has a cognitive core, whereas Durkheim mainly
highlighted the affective aspect in moral education.

2.2.3 Hoffman’s theory of moral internalization

In contrast to Kohlberg, Hoffman more positively addressed the insights of Durkheim. In

Hoffman (1979)’s words,
The legacy of Freud and Durkheim is the agreement among social scientists that
most people do not go through life viewing society’s moral norms (e.g., honesty,
justice, fair play) as external, coercively imposed pressures. Though initially
external and often in conflict with one’s desires, the norms eventually become part
of one’s motive system and affect behavior even in the absence of external authority.
The challenge is to discover what types of experience foster this internalization.
(958)

Like Durkheim, Hoffman (2000) thought that moral development is the internalization of society’s
moral norms, whereas Kohlberg perceived moral development as basically an autonomous process.
Also, Hoffman highlighted affect in moral formation, whereas Kohlberg emphasized cognition.
Hoffman said that parental discipline is at the heart of his theory, and Hoffman’s emphasis on
parental discipline echoes Durkheim’s first element of morality, the spirit of discipline.
Hoffman argued that empathic distress is a basis for mature morality. He found that
children’s empathic distress develops in stages as they develop cognitive capability. Hoffman’s
connection of affect with cognition can be seen clearly in his explanation of parental discipline.
Parents “put pressure on children to change their behavior…[and] communicate disapproval of
children’s harmful actions” (156). Through the induction process, which is a type of parental
discipline, “parents highlight the other’s perspective, point up the other’s distress, and make it
clear that the child’s action caused it” (143). In other words, parents can help children develop
causal attribution so that children can recognize when their actions caused harm and develop
adequate moral emotion (in this case, guilt). In this case, parental discipline includes both cognitive
and affective elements: The induction process includes cognitive elements because parents make
their children become aware of something that they did not see before. The induction process
includes affective elements because parents create the atmosphere “enough to get the child to stop
what he or she is doing, attend, and process the induction but not enough to arouse undue anger
and fear, which can disrupt the processing” (144).

20
 Hoffman’s theory suggests that optimal discipline results from an appropriate balance
between affect and cognition. However, although Durkheim and Hoffman used the same term
discipline to refer to the regulation of children’s behavior, Hoffman’s primary interest was parental
discipline, whereas Durkheim’s was school discipline. Hoffman discussed parental discipline
specifically in a transgression situation, where children have already harmed others. In contrast,
Durkheim’s discipline covered any violation of social rules or norms. Since Hoffman’s theory
addressed family situations, it might not extend to other situations: more complex social units may
require different kinds of discipline. We can find some insights necessary for the extension from
Haidt’s theory of morality.

2.2.4 Haidt’s social intuitionist model and moral foundations theory

Like Hoffman, Haidt primarily focused on the affective aspect of morality. Haidt
acknowledged that people utilize affect as information in decision-making: for example, one’s
feeling of pleasantness or unpleasantness at the moment of decision-making influences the one’s
judgment unconsciously. Haidt suggested a different tool for understanding morality – intuition,
which he contrasted with reasoning. According to Haidt, intuition is a kind of cognition that
explains “the dozens or hundreds of rapid, effortless moral judgments … we all make every day”
(Haidt 2012, 53). Haidt criticized the dominant rationalist approach in moral psychology and
argued that moral reasoning “does not cause moral judgment … [it] is usually a post hoc
construction” (Haidt 2001, 814).
In Haidt’s social intuitionist model, moral judgment comes from intuition, and reasoning
is generated after a judgment to influence others. However, while arguing that moral intuitions are
more powerful than reasoning, Haidt said that intuition is “not an absolute dictator” (Haidt 2012,
79). Intuitions are influenced by reasons, and sometimes intuitions change when one interacts with
other people or broader society (social persuasion, in his term). Due to such social aspects, the
model is called the social intuitionist model. Haidt also said that sometimes an individual’s own
moral reasoning also can lead to judgment and change the individual’s moral intuition, but he
argued that change is rare.
Although other scholars have called Haidt a relativist (Gibbs 2019), Haidt identified
himself as a moral pluralist and criticized moral monism, “the attempt to ground all of the morality
on a single principle” (132). His Moral Foundations Theory identifies five moral foundations

21
which form a taxonomy of moral intuitions: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal,
authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation. Haidt argued that those foundations are innate but
malleable with the influence of the environment where an individual belongs. For example, an
individual who is innately prone to rely more on the care foundation in moral decision-making can
become more reliant on other foundations, depending on the environment which they are exposed
to. This explanation aligns with social persuasion in Haidt’s social intuitionist model. Such social
influence on one’s intuition is analogous to the discipline of Durkheim, which facilitates the
internalization of social norms.
Hoffman and Haidt both focused on affective aspects of morality and considered moral
formation as a socialization process rather than as autonomous development. However, Hoffman’s
theory was grounded only on only two of Haidt’s five foundations, care/harm and
fairness/cheating. Also, Hoffman and Haidt considered different roles for empathy. Whereas
Hoffman’s empathy primarily arises for a victim in distress, Haidt’s empathy is perspective-taking
toward someone with a different opinion. While focusing on social units such as workplaces and
nations that are more complex than families and schools, Haidt’s theory uniquely provides insights
on the importance of culture and the differences in value priorities between individuals.

2.3 Synthesis of Durkheim, Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt

While the selection criteria for the three thinkers – Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt – was
primarily their position on the spectrum of cognitive and affective primacy, Durkheim was added
due to his influence on those three thinkers and his ideas worked as a backbone of the synthesis.
The synthesis was feasible because each of the three thinkers’ work is related to Durkheim’s work,
although the three thinkers focused on different elements of moral formation and moral functioning.
Table 2.1 summarizes and compares the four thinkers.

22
 Table 2.1. Summary of the Comparison between Durkheim, Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt.
Durkheim Kohlberg Hoffman Haidt
Descriptive vs. Descriptive and Descriptive and Descriptive and Descriptive
Normative normative normative normative
Perspective on Relativism Universalism Universalism Pluralism
ethical
principle
Major ethical N/A Justice Care, fairness Care, fairness,
principle(s) loyalty,
authority,
sanctity
Primary Elements of Development of Development of Role of intuition
interest morality and moral reasoning empathic distress in ethical
secular moral (children and (children and decision-making,
education adolescents, often adolescents) foundations of
young adult)
morality
How one’s Socialization and Autonomous Socialization and Interaction of
morality internalization process internalization individual traits
develops (or and social
changes) persuasion
Affect vs. Emotion and Cognitive Affective Intuitive primacy
cognition for understanding primacy primacy with but sometimes
development both matters highlighting the reasoning
(or, formation) importance of matters
cognition
Context of School discipline Children and Parental Dispute between
theory and/or adolescent’s discipline adults (e.g.,
application development political argument)

Durkheim, Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt differed on whether moral formation results
primarily from autonomous development or from social processes. Although none of these thinkers
believed that there is only one source of moral formation, Kohlberg favored autonomous
development, whereas the other three favored social processes.
The thinkers also differed in their opinion on whether cognition or affect is primary, but
they also did not believe that there is only one source of moral functioning. This combination of
cognition and affect is highlighted in the thinkers’ writings. For example, as explained earlier,
Hoffman showed the combination of cognition and affect in parental discipline. Although parental
discipline and social discipline for professionals are obviously different, the idea of considering
the combining cognition and affect is transferrable. Durkheim’s writing also suggests how to
utilize the combination of cognition and affect for moral formation for a different social unit from

23
the family. Durkheim explained that the core of school discipline is a communication of
disapproval, which necessarily elicits an initial affective response, as well as a subsequent
cognitive understanding. In Durkheim (1925)’s words:
Confronted with a misdeed, then, the teacher must prevent this weakening of the
class’s moral convictions…. He must certainly show that he is in no way
sympathetic with the offense, that he rejects it and repudiates it, which is to say, in
sum, that he disapproves of it with a disapproval consonant with the importance of
the misdeed. (175).

2.4 A New Conceptual Framework for Professional Socialization

Drawing on the ideas of the four thinkers, this section defines a new conceptual framework
for professional socialization, which includes moral formation. In this framework, the term moral
formation will be used to broadly cover the meaning of Kohlberg and Hoffman’s notion of
development and Durkheim and Haidt’s notion of changes (non-hierarchical development).
Professional socialization is a process of individuals’ entrance into the group of
professionals, including understanding the group and shaping affective and behavioral responses
towards it. Through the socialization process, individuals learn the expected behaviors in the group
and decide their way of being in the group: They decide what kind of person they will be and how
they will perform in the group, reflecting their personality, values, and purposes. They construct
their professional identity as members of the group. Moral formation is the process of integrating
the social norms and values into individuals’ own motive systems. Thus, the term moral formation
implies the notion of moral internalization, but desirable moral formation differs from blindly
accepting social norms. Socialization is a broader concept than moral formation, but those two are
interlocked and concurrent processes.
In this framework, individuals’ pre-socialized behavior changes into post-socialized,
autonomous deference to the moral principles of the professional group throughout the moral
formation process. Both pre- and post-socialized behaviors reflect the individual’s characteristics,
such as pre-established intuition and dispositional traits. Consequently, individuals in a similar
stage of moral formation may behave differently. The moral formation process is influenced by
social discipline, a collective process that broadly covers Haidt’s social persuasion, Durkheim’s
school discipline, and Hoffman’s parental discipline. Desirable social discipline comes from an
appropriate balance between cognition and affect. The contents of social discipline can be changed

24
by feedback from nascent professionals and by critical reflection from current members, although
these changes are not the major focus of this paper. Figure 2 shows a representation of the process
of moral formation during professional socialization.

Figure 2.2. The process of moral formation, a significant part of professional socialization. 1: the
relationship between individual characteristics and behaviors. 2: moral formation process. 3:
influence of social discipline on one’s change process. 4: feedback from nascent professionals’
behavior on the contents of social discipline. 5: feedback from socialized individuals’ critical
reflection. 6: balance between cognitive and affective components in social discipline.

This proposed framework distinguishes cognition, affect, emotion, and intuition. Cognition
broadly means information processing, whether conscious or subconscious. Deliberate reasoning
is a representative cognitive process. Affect refers to bodily sensations that can be mapped into a
two-dimensional space of valence (pleasantness) and arousal (intensity) (Barrett, 2018). Emotion
includes both cognitive and affective aspects. Haidt (2012) said emotions are “filled with cognition”
(52), and Barrett (2018) said that emotion is the “brain’s creation of what … bodily sensations
mean” (30). Barrett’s explanation supports Hoffman’s argument that children’s causal attribution
(cognition) is important for their guilt (emotion) development. Intuition is an automatic and quick
form of cognition, which contrasts with reasoning, a deliberate and slow form of cognition.
The term social discipline was suggested to describe discipline as a collective process, such
as cultural influences, not a process of coercion by a powerful individual. The major elements in
social discipline depend on the context. In a family context, the major element is parental discipline,
but in professional education, the major elements are school discipline (e.g., the influence of

25
professors, curriculum) and social persuasion (e.g., the influence of peers, mentors, internship
supervisors, or broadly, organizational culture).
The next interesting question would be how the collective discipline can work in a social
unit for professionals (e.g., organizations that professionals work for) that is larger than family and
school, and how to create an environment where appropriate social discipline can work. To
emphasize the environmental factors, in the next section, I will focus on the culture of a profession
and its influence on individuals’ moral formation.

2.4.1 Culture and social discipline

Durkheim, Hoffman, and Haidt described moral formation as a socialization process. They
basically viewed the process as individuals’ internalization of the moral norms of a society’s
culture, i.e., the shared values, beliefs, and expectations.
Hofstede (1980) defined culture as “a system of collectively held values” (24). In his
definition, societal norms inform the structure and functioning of social institutions (e.g., education,
religion, political structure), and the social institutions also contribute to the maintenance of the
societal norms. Societal norms are often explicitly expressed in a form of written statements (e.g.,
codes of ethics) or verbal language (e.g., a famous mantra such as “Quality is Job 1.”), but in many
cases they are implicit: People who are embedded in a cultural environment often feel difficulty in
grasping the culture that is already reflected in their behavior (Hofstede 1980).
Similarly, Spradley (1979) divided cultural knowledge into explicit cultural knowledge and
tacit knowledge. Spradley suggested that tacit knowledge constitutes a large part of any culture.
Tacit knowledge is produced by an implicit learning process, which is independent of conscious
awareness. This implicit process explains the phenomenon of intuition (Reber 1989), and intuition
partly comes from one’s accumulated cultural knowledge. Affect is also tacit. Affect is pervasive
in individuals’ any relational activities and has a strong impact on individuals’ behavior, but it is
not at the surface level like other deliberate cognitive activities such as verbal communication.
Therefore, it seems natural that socialization theorists would explain the moral formation process
primarily as the work of intuition and affect.
However, cultural knowledge also includes explicit cultural knowledge beyond tacit
knowledge, and indeed conscious intervention in one’s implicit learning of ethics can only start

26
from conscious deliberation. That was the reason why this paper argued desirable social discipline
includes both cognitive and affective components.
Before discussing the educational implication of the new conceptual framework, it would
be helpful to distinguish carefully between social discipline and culture. This paper argues that
they are different in that social discipline is the process of using cultural influences to facilitate the
moral formation of the members of the social group. The contents of social discipline come from
culture, a dynamic and evolving entity that reflects the members of the society’s intervention.
In the context of professionals, the contents of social discipline come from the culture of
the profession. For example, in the case of the engineering profession, engineering culture includes
ethical standards of engineers, which are the essential element of social discipline. These ethical
standards are emphasized by establishing codes of ethics and by supporting ethics education.
Since many professionals, including engineers, work within an organization such as a
private company or a government agency, the culture of the organization often mediates the
relationship between the individuals and the broader professional culture. While organizational
culture often reflects the culture of employees’ professional culture (Hofstede 1980), Valentine
and Fleischman (2008) showed that companies’ attitudes toward ethical and social responsibility
influence their employees’ beliefs about the ethical and social responsibilities of their profession.
It is also possible that organizational values and standards do not reflect or are not well aligned
with the professional culture. Valentine and Fleischman (2008) argued that individuals sometimes
experience conflict between the values of their organization and the values of their profession, so
organizations need to cultivate an ethical culture that aligns with the professional values of
employees, or help employees navigate the conflicts between the two to ensure the ethical practice
of their employees.
Many organizations have tried to cultivate an ethical culture to encourage ethical behaviors
by their employees (Epley and Tannenbaum 2017). In organizations whose management aims to
create a unitary organizational culture, employees are often exposed to a clear articulation of the
organizational emphasis, typically propagated as a credo or corporate code of ethics. Also, such
organizational emphases are often reflected throughout the organization from rewards systems to
regular events (Sinclair 1993). For example, in a study of ethical engineering practice in the health
products industry, Kim and Hess (n.d.) showed how companies in this industry emphasize ethical

27
practice throughout various practices including the initial employment interview and managers’
behavior.
Such organizational practices have also been endorsed by ethics scholars, who argued the
importance of focusing properly on organizational culture to foster individuals’ ethical decision-
making (Meyers 2004; Spitzer 2006). Actually, the relationship between organizational culture
and individuals’ ethical decision-making has been investigated in empirical studies (Douglas et al.
2001). Some scholars have suggested how to manage organizational culture to promote ethical
behavior (Sinclair 1993; Robin and Reidenbach 1988). Such methods to cultivate organizational
culture can be a type of social discipline, although the professional social discipline goes beyond
the organizational boundary to include the overall profession.
This section described cultivating professional and organizational culture as a
representative example of social discipline. The next section describes how social discipline can
be incorporated into professional ethics education.

2.5 Implications for Professional Ethics Education

So far, I have discussed how social discipline describes the process of moral formation, the
socialization process through which nascent professionals internalize the moral values of a
profession. To elaborate on how the idea can be applied to professional ethics education more
concretely, in the next section, I will provide a specific example of social discipline in engineering
ethics education. While the new conceptual framework and the idea of social discipline are broadly
applicable to professional ethics education in general, we provide an example of engineering to
give a more concrete example. Here, engineering means engineering in general, including all
engineering fields such as chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering. This approach aligns
well with ethics education in other professions: medical ethics education applies to doctors in
general, including all medical specialties; legal ethics education applies to lawyers in general.

2.5.1 Example of engineering ethics education

The professional socialization of engineers begins in undergraduate education and

continues in the workplace. Undergraduate engineering programs emphasize the values of
engineering such as conscientiousness (Florman 1987), safety, and service to the public. These

28
values are included in engineering codes of ethics, which require engineers to “hold paramount the
safety, health, and welfare of the public” (NSPE 2018). Engineers’ professional formation starts
from awareness and internalization of these values.
Line 2 in Figure 2 represents professional moral formation. Before undergraduate
engineering education, students are not yet formal members of the engineering profession.
Students show pre-socialized behavior, and they know little about the values and norms of the
engineering profession. As they progress through undergraduate education and their careers, they
accept the values of engineering and autonomously defer to the moral values of the engineering
profession. In particular, students learn to prioritize the safety and welfare of the public. However,
individuals’ behaviors differ because there are individual differences. For example, students start
their undergraduate engineering education with different personalities, values, and purposes, and
even after the professional socialization the individuals are not identical. Although individuals
internalize professional values into themselves, how they live with those values will differ.
As an example of individual differences, Frey (2010) described two engineers with
different personality traits who have a similar concern on a mining project: one is Persistent
Engineer with high levels of the personality traits of openness and agreeableness, and the other is
Activist Engineer with relatively low levels of openness and agreeableness. The Persistent
Engineer is more open to listening to diverse viewpoints on the project and integrates those
viewpoints into political compromise, whereas the Activist Engineer frames the mining project as
social injustice and tries to create effective grassroots opposition. Both have ethical viewpoints
with a similar concern, but their behaviors differ.
To facilitate students’ moral formation, engineering ethics education has primarily focused
on teaching reasoning skills (Kim and Jesiek 2019) as other professional ethics educators have
done. However, aligned with the opinion of the thinkers who emphasized affect and described
moral formation as a socialization process, some empirical studies indicate that prosocial moral
reasoning is not necessarily associated with overall prosocial behavior in a positive way (Hardy
2006). In essence, teaching reasoning is not enough for helping students internalize values as an
engineering profession (or, not enough for helping them shape moral motivation). Please note, I
am not saying that teaching reasoning is useless. It is important. Durkheim emphasized the
importance of understanding, and Haidt acknowledged the function of reasoning. I mean that

29
teaching only reasoning skills is not desirable, because it can easily lead to post-hoc
rationalizations (Haidt 2001; Ditto et al. 2009).
This paper has argued that engineering ethics education can be approached as a social
discipline process, with both cognitive and affective components. Educators may consider teaching
knowledge about engineering ethics, such as codes of ethics, while eliciting proper affective
association with the content, by using vivid stories and riveting videos about engineering disasters.
Such efforts should be focused on how to help students see the value of engineers’ ethical practice
and internalize such values into the students’ selves.
Also, educators may address individual differences and consider how to encourage students
to find their way of being in the profession by integrating their personal values with the values of
engineering. For example, educators may first try to help students to analyze what their personal
values are. Durkheim also talked about the initial analysis:
Whether we find support in the innate disposition of the child … according to
whether we consider the child either purely selfish or else, on the contrary, already
accessible to a nascent altruism, which we simply develop. This initial analysis will
determine our basic approach. This is why … we began by asking about the child’s
characteristic mental states, so that we might build upon them in order to achieve
the desired result (Durkheim 1925, 207-208).

Although Durkheim focused specifically on analyzing children’s selfish or altruistic nature among
various dimensions that can characterize an individual, educators can approach the analysis more
broadly: educators can help students reflect on their own values, such as their moral foundations
(Haidt 2012), and can encourage students to integrate professional values into themselves. In other
words, educators can try to appeal to individuals’ interior disposition (Spitzer 2006) by inviting
students to reflect on their purpose in life and to consider how to harmonize that purpose with
professional values. In particular, engineering educators can ask students to reflect how their
values and purpose in life connect with important engineering values, such as the health, safety,
and welfare of the public.
Reflections that connect personal values with professional values are examples of moral
narratives, which are defined as the stories that support and sustain one’s moral life (McAdams
and Pals 2006). Tappan and Brown (1989) argued that the narrative approach to moral education
provides students with the opportunity to “tell their own moral stories, and thus to express and
enhance their own authority and responsibility through the process of authoring” (194). As an

30
instructional method, constructing moral narratives can address individual differences properly
because students construct their own moral narratives.
Since the construction of a personal moral narrative requires the re-interpretation of
personal values and life experiences, it is a process of meaning-making, which impacts individuals’
motivation. Since different ways of meaning-making either enhances or diminishes individuals’
motivation (Weiner 1971), educators can utilize this idea for ethics education. For example, think
of a student who is very interested in environmental sustainability. If the meaning that the student
makes out of engineering practice centers on engineering’s ability to resolve current challenges in
the environment, this meaning can strengthen their motivation toward being an ethical engineer.
In contrast, if the only meaning that the student can find out of engineering is its negative side
(e.g., engineering innovation has led to current degradation of the environment), this meaning can
weaken the student’s motivation.
As students find meaning in engineering activities that comports with their own values,
they can create moral narratives which integrate personal values with professional values. In turn,
these narratives can positively impact their motivation to perform as an ethical engineer. For
example, educators might encourage students who have care-oriented values to study the idea of
human-centered design (Zoltowski, Oakes, and Cardella 2013) and help them to construct a moral
narrative that integrates their central values such as empathy and care with typical engineering
values.
To the best of my knowledge, there has been only one previous attempt to use a narrative
approach in engineering ethics education. Woodson and Zhu (2018) introduced autobiography in
the teaching of engineering ethics. In their course, they asked students to record their daily actions
in a diary. Analyzing the diary, students determined their personal moral principles. Later in the
semester, students revisited these moral principles and identified the best principles that could
guide their future actions. Educators may actively adopt this autobiographical approach to facilitate
students’ moral formation, but there can be many variations in the instructional methods using a
narrative approach. For example, I suggest asking students to reflect on their pathway to become
an engineering student and refer to engineering values to construct their own moral narratives. The
instructional method that I suggest is different from Woodson and Zhu’s method in that my method
requires engineering students to directly connect their own values to the professional values of
engineers to construct their moral narratives.

31
 In engineering, social discipline arises in the culture of the engineering profession, the
culture of engineers’ workplaces, and the culture of engineering schools. Since engineering
educators have limited influence on the culture of the profession and no influence on the culture
of workplaces outside the academy, I suggest that engineering educators focus on cultivating ethics
in the culture of engineering schools. When this culture values ethical practice, students may tacitly
internalize cultural knowledge about professional values as moral intuitions. Thus, this suggestion
comports with the emphasis of Haidt (2012) on intuition.

2.6 Limitations

There are a few limitations in this paper. First, although the new conceptual framework explains
the overall process of professional socialization, it cannot specify the details of the change process.
For example, what do novices actually experience during the process? What types of social
discipline exist? How do different types of social discipline promote or hinder one’s moral
formation? Nevertheless, this framework can inform future empirical studies, using the concepts I
suggested. These future studies will be able to produce guidance for improvements in professional
ethics education. Another limitation is that this paper only provides an example of engineering
education. Although there are similarities across professions, some aspects might not transfer
directly to other fields. This paper’s general suggestions need to be properly adapted to the context
of specific professions.

2.7 Conclusion

Based on a synthesis of ideas from Durkheim, Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt, I constructed
a new conceptual framework for professional moral formation and discussed its educational
implications. I argued that professional education begins the professional socialization process,
and that students’ moral formation can be facilitated by social discipline. Especially, I suggested
focusing on individual differences and the cultural influences on professional moral formation,
which are especially important in the context of professional ethics education. After introducing
the new conceptual framework, I described how to facilitate professional moral formation with the
specific example of engineering education. I applied the framework to suggest an instructional
method which can appeal to students’ emotions and enable students to create their own moral

32
narratives. Also, I suggested that educators should create a college culture that emphasizes the
importance of ethical engineering practice.

2.8 Acknowledgments

I thank Dr. Michael C. Loui, Dr. Anne Colby, and Dr. Eric Bredo for helpful discussions.

33
 POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES AND MORAL
FOUNDATIONS OF ENGINEERING PROFESSIONALS IN THE
UNITED STATES

3.1 Introduction

What should be the normative goals of engineering practice? Engineering professionals

have collectively offered some general answers to such questions, both implicitly or explicitly. For
example, some specific norms and priorities for engineers can be found in professional ethics codes
(NSPE 2019; AIChE 2012; ASME 2006; IEEE 2004) and aspirational reports such as the Grand
Challenges of the National Academy of Engineering (2008). However, individual engineers may
have different answers to those questions depending on their values, beliefs, or worldviews, i.e.,
their general moral perspectives.
One’s general moral commitments are linked to their vision of a good society, and the
process of defining what constitutes a good society is “fundamentally ideological” (Spector 2008,
315). Thus, engineers’ general moral commitments are closely related to their political ideologies.
While engineers have often neglected the political and value-laden nature of their work (Karwat
2020; Cech 2012; Riley 2012), engineering is a fundamentally political act. Holt (2001) argued
that while engineers often draw boundaries between their technical work and the political contexts
in which it is embedded, engineering practice is nonetheless “conditioned by the integration of
technical knowledge within prevailing personal and social values and their institutional
embodiments” (499). Because engineering practice is inherently political, engineering ethics
scholars have argued that engineering ethics education needs to include concerns related to broader
societal context, such as policy engagement (Mitcham 2009; Conlon 2008; Wulf 2004). Further,
it has been argued that in evaluating technology and its broader societal impact, reflecting on
political assumptions underlying the evaluation is also important (Coeckelbergh 2018). However,
very few studies have systematically explored the political ideologies of engineering professionals,
who would be the main agents of the technology development and evaluation – the political
engagement.
Therefore, this paper reports on an exploratory study of political ideologies among
practicing engineers. Specifically, I explore how engineers’ political ideologies vary across their
employment sectors, their positions in their workplace organizations, and their demographic

34
attributes. Engineers work in various sectors including the for-profit business organizations and
government (National Science Board 2018). It has been argued that high-level ideological sorting
across sectors can provide insights on the way they “coordinate, mobilize, and otherwise engage
in the political process” (Bonica 2014, 383). Also, comparisons across positions and demographic
groups could provide insights regarding how visions of what counts as good society vary across
subgroups of engineers. Moreover, I explore engineers’ moral foundations, which have been
suggested as strong predictors of one’s political ideology (Graham et al. 2009). A more detailed
discussion on the relationship between political ideology and moral foundations follows in the
literature review section. To sum, in this paper, I answer the following research questions:
RQ1: How do practicing engineers’ political ideologies vary across employment sectors,
organizational positions, and demographic attributes?
RQ2: How do practicing engineers’ moral foundations vary across employment sectors,
organizational positions, and demographic attributes?
RQ3: How are practicing engineers’ political ideologies related to their moral foundations?

3.2 Literature Review

3.2.1 Political ideology

Political ideology is pervasive in everyday life (Jost 2006). While there is no consensus
definition of political ideology, Ball et al. (2017) defined it as “a fairly coherent and comprehensive
set of ideas that explains and evaluates social conditions, helps people understand their place in
society, and provides a program for social and political action” (6). Ideologies are based on
assumptions about human nature, and these assumptions about basic human motives, possibilities,
and limitations inform what goals people think are politically achievable.
For example, the political ideology of liberalism is based upon the belief that human beings
are fundamentally rational beings. Liberalism attributes current social conditions to the choices
and actions of rational individuals, favors social conditions which ensure individual freedom,
orients society to ensure individuals live as they want and respect the rights of others who live
freely, and suggests promoting individual liberty and opportunity. In contrast, conservatism is
often called “the politics of imperfection” (Ball et al. 2017, 111), which means it is based upon the
assumption that human beings are naturally imperfect and follow selfish motives. Conservatism

35
explains that current social conditions result from the imperfections of human nature, favors social
conditions which ensure stability and peace in a society, orients individuals to play their own part
responsibly in a society, and suggests improving a society gradually and cautiously because
conservatives think radical social change cannot be successful and even it is dangerous due to
imperfect human nature.
While the preceding passage describes some basic ideas of liberalism and conservatism,
what it means to identify as liberal or conservative changes over time and place (Jost 2006). Such
changes have also born multiple subdivisions in each ideology – e.g., welfare liberalism,
neoclassical liberalism (or, libertarianism), and libertarian anarchism in contemporary liberalism;
traditional conservatism, individualist conservatism, neoconservatism, and the religious right in
contemporary conservatism (Ball et al. 2017). Despite such complexities, ideological divisions in
the U.S. have been traditionally discussed on a single liberal-conservative (or left-right) dimension.
While other factors and dimensions have been introduced to reflect additional complexities
(Caprara 2007; Caprara et al. 2017; Kitschelt and Hellemans 1990), the single dimension of liberal-
conservative still serves an important organizing role in contemporary political thought (Caprara
et al. 2017; Jost et al. 2009; Jost 2006; Bonica 2014).

3.2.2 Political ideology in occupations

While it is intuitive how political ideologies are pervasive in public policy issues, how they
underlie in other aspects of society, such as occupational activities, is more implicit and opaque.
However, occupational activities are always embedded in political environments, and practitioners
are influenced by that context. For example, the thoughts and actions of managers are influenced
by the ideologies of the political context at that time (Spector 2006).
To more directly examine possible patterns in political ideologies among individuals in
different industry sectors, Bonica (2014) examined publicly available information about donations
to political campaigns and causes during the 2004-2012 election cycles. He showed that donations
from academics; entertainment; newspapers and print media; and online computer services were
heavily skewed to the left, whereas donations from oil, gas, and coal; agriculture; building and
construction; and mining industries were reliably conservative. He further suggested that
ideological sorting across industries and occupations would provide a better understanding of how
industries coordinate with the political context where they are embedded. Accordingly, Bonica et

36
al. (2016) also examined distributions of political ideologies across various occupations and
reported that American lawyers lean to the left on the ideological spectrum, while there is a slight
bimodality in the distribution. In that paper, they further compared lawyers to the other well-
educated professions, including academics and medical doctors, and found that lawyers and
academics generally lean towards the left, while medical doctors lean to the right.
For some occupations, political ideologies not only predict professionals’ voting behaviors
as a citizen but also impact their practice as professions. For example, Rosenwald and Hyde (2006)
investigated the relationship between political ideologies of social workers and their practice. They
showed that while over 90% of the study participants self-reported that they could separate their
practice from their political ideologies, participants with more liberal perspectives were more
likely to bring their ideological views into their practice. Also, Norton and Tan (2019) reported
licensed mental health counselors’ political ideologies predict their preferred counseling theories.
Few studies have explored the ideological spectrum of engineering professionals. While Bonica et
al. (2016) reported the ideological distribution of “technology workers” (293) and suggested that
they were most liberal among the occupations they examined, they did not define what the
technology workers mean in their paper. In particular, “technology workers” might have included
many occupations besides engineering professionals. As one exception, Zussman (1985)
investigated the political orientations of engineers who were working in two Massachusetts
companies and reported 53% of engineers (vs. 30% of general national survey participants)
identified themselves as Republicans in 1972. To the best of our knowledge, this report based on
almost a half-a-century-old data was the only example that reported practicing engineering
professionals’ political orientation with empirical data. Also, the study was conducted at only two
employers, and there have been no large-scale, empirical, quantitative studies about political
ideologies of engineers across many workplaces.
Compared to other professions (e.g., lawyers), it is rather implicit how political ideology
impacts the practice of the engineering profession. Supported by the value-neutrality thesis of
technology (e.g., Patt 2014), the work of the engineering profession has been often argued as value-
neutral. However, the argument, as well as the value-neutrality thesis, have been widely criticized
(Morrow 2014; Miller 2021; Banks and Lachney 2017; Balabanian 2006; Karwat 2020; Riley
2008; Ihde 2002). Scholars have argued that political considerations are pervasive in engineering
culture. For example, in one classic article, Winner (1980) argued that technologies in society are

37
deeply interwoven with politics with some examples including the innovation of the pneumatic
molding machine for enhanced efficiency in Cyrus McCormick’s reaper manufacturing plant in
the 1880s. He argued that over history, the development of technologies reflects the human
motives towards having “dominion over others” (124).
There also have been studies that pointed out ideologies embedded in engineering culture,
although the ideologies are not necessarily the same sort of political ideologies as already
discussed. For example, Nieusma and Blue (2012) argued the pervasiveness of militarism in
engineering culture, and Cech (2013) proposed the pervasiveness of meritocracy in engineering
culture. While they did not directly connect their argument with political ideologies, some common
characteristics of conservatism in contemporary politics include an emphasis on security and social
order (Davis and Silver 2004; Schwart and Boehnke 2004; Jost et al. 2009) and belief in
meritocracy (Hing et al. 2011; Napier and Jost 2008). Therefore, the arguments of embedded
militarism and meritocracy in engineering culture may suggest a relatively conservative culture in
engineering, which was also argued by Riley (2008).

3.2.3 Moral foundations theory

Since people tend to vote for political parties that they believe will protect and promote the
values that they think are important, one’s political ideology is closely related to their values
(Carprara et al. 2017). For example, Piurko et al. (2011) showed that values more strongly
predicted political ideology of study participants than sociodemographic variables in liberal
countries like the U.S. They found that right-wing political ideology covaried positively with
tradition (e.g., be humble, follow the customs), power (e.g., be rich, be respected by others),
conformity (e.g., follow the rules even when no one is watching, behave properly), and security
values (e.g., live in secure surroundings), whereas the right-wing political ideology negatively
covaried with universalism values (e.g., treat people equally, care for the environment). Caprara
et al. (2017) reported similar results, and Janoff-Bulman and Carnes (2016) empirically found that
liberals emphasize social justice, whereas conservatives emphasize social order.
Although there are many social and moral values, Haidt (2012)’s Moral Foundations
Theory provides a general classification of moral values across cultures. In this theory, there are
five moral foundations: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Haidt explained that the
degree to which a person endorses each moral foundation in making moral judgments varies by

38
person. The importance of each moral foundation for each person depends on both genetic and
environmental factors.
Further, Haidt and his colleagues found that the Moral Foundations Theory well explains
the political behaviors of people in the U.S. For instance, Graham, Haidt, and Nosek (2009)
reported that liberals endorsed the Care and Fairness foundations much more than the other three
foundations, whereas conservatives endorsed all five moral foundations equally (also see Haidt
and Graham 2007). More precisely, conservatives value Loyalty, Authority, and Purity more than
liberals, while they value Care and Fairness less than liberals. Graham et al. (2011) further reported
that this pattern is robust across national and cultural contexts.
Given the potential explanatory power of Moral Foundations Theory, understanding
engineers’ moral foundations can provide unique insights to better understand engineers’ political
ideologies. However, to our best knowledge, there has been no empirical study that explored
engineering professionals’ moral foundations. As a few exceptions for engineering-related
populations, Beever and Pinkert (2019) explored engineering students’ moral foundations across
engineering subdisciplines. Additionally, Clancy and Hohberger (2019) explored Chinese
engineering students’ moral foundations, and Clancy (2020) reported the relationship between
Chinese engineering students’ moral foundations and ethical reasoning skills.

3.3 Methods

3.3.1 Data collection

Measures. I collected survey data using published instruments for measuring political
ideology and moral foundations. For political ideology, I used a one-item 7-point Likert scale
measure (1 = strongly liberal, 2 = moderately liberal, 3 = slightly liberal, 4 = neutral, 5 = slightly
conservative, 6 = moderately conservative, 7 = strongly conservative). This is also often called a
political self-placement item, as survey participants position themselves on the single-dimension
bipolar liberal-conservative spectrum.
For moral foundations, I utilized the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham et al.
2009), consisting of 32 items with five dimensions - Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity.
Half of the measure (16 items total) asks participants to rate to what extent each given
consideration is relevant to their thinking when they decide whether something is right or wrong.

39
For example, participants are given statements like “whether or not someone suffered emotionally”
and asked to answer with 6-point Likert item (0 = not at all relevant, 1 = not very relevant, 2 =
slightly relevant, 3 = somewhat relevant, 4 = very relevant, 5= extremely relevant). The answer 0
(not at all relevant) indicates that the consideration has nothing to do with their judgments of right
or wrong. The other half of the measure (16 items total) asks participants to rate to what extent
they agree with each statement. For example, participants are given statements like “compassion
for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue” and asked to answer with 6-point Likert item
(0 = strongly disagree, 1 = moderately disagree, 2 = slightly disagree, 3 = slightly agree, 4 =
moderately agree, 5 = strongly agree). Among the 32 items, two of them are attention check items.
Therefore, among the remaining 30 items, 6 items measure each of the five moral foundations, and
the total score for each foundation ranges from 0 to 30.
The survey also included extensive demographic questions for participants’ age, gender,
race/ethnicity, and work experience (e.g., current employer’s industry sector).
Participants. As previously described in Kim et al. (2021b), I distributed the survey to
engineering practitioners who are working in various employment sectors through social media
(e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter) and alumni associations of my institution in the fall of 2020. There were
four recruitment criteria for the survey: 1) holding at least one degree (BS or higher) in
engineering, technology, or a related field, 2) earned bachelor’s degree more than 3 years ago (as
of September 2020), 3) currently working full time in industry as an engineer or other technical
professional, including management (or, if currently unemployed, worked full time in industry as
an engineer or other technical professional recently), and 4) the United States is the current country
of residence. At the end of the survey, survey participants could submit their contact information
voluntarily, to be entered into a drawing for a $100 Amazon gift card. Odds of winning was 1 in
20. As a result, 651 engineering practitioners completed the survey at least partially, and 518 of
them completed the survey to the end. I excluded three of the 518 from the dataset, because they
did not meet the inclusion criteria. Therefore, for this study, a total of 515 survey responses could
be utilized for the analysis. Table 3.1 shows the demographic information of the 515 survey
respondents.

40
 Table 3.1. Participant Demographic Information (n=515)
Demographic Variables n % Demographic Variables n %
Age Employment Sector
Less than 30 130 25 Automotive 38 7
30 – 49 231 45 Computer/Electronics/IT 87 17
50+ (more than 50) 154 30 Construction 34 7
Gender Food 15 3
Male 405 79 Government 16 3
Female 101 20 Healthcare 35 7
Others1 9 1 Manufacturing – Other3 76 15
Race Military/Defense/Aerospace 40 8
White/Caucasian 312 61 Oil and Gas/Mining 35 7
Asian or Asian American 123 24 Retail 10 2
Others2 80 16 Transportation 20 4
Position Utilities 29 6
Entry level 34 7 Consulting 14 3
Individual contributor 189 37 Consumer Products 25 5
Project manager 105 20 Others 41 8
Mid-level manager 76 15 Academic Degrees Held
Top-level manager 58 11 Bachelor’s degree 515 100
Executive/C-level 53 10 Master’s degree 226 44
PhD degree 59 11
Other professional degrees4 76 15
1
Including “Prefer not to answer” (7 responses = 1% of total)
2
Including Hispanic or Latino/a (21 responses = 4% of total), Black or African American (18 responses = 3% of
total), mixed race (24 responses = 5% of total), American Indian or Alaska Native (2 responses = 0% of total), and
Prefer not to answer (15 responses = 3% of total)
3
Manufacturing-Other means all the other manufacturing businesses including machinery and metal products
manufacturing beyond the manufacturing of the other listed sectors in the table (e.g., automotive manufacturing,
electronics manufacturing)
4
Including MBA, JD, MD

3.3.2 Data analysis

Among the 515 responses, four responses had one or two items of missing data. Since the
amount of missing data was less than 1%, I decided to use listwise deletion (Bannett 2001). For
our data, the Cronbach’s alpha values for Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity
foundations were 0.63, 0.59, 0.67, 0.69, and 0.76 respectively, which suggests acceptable level of
internal consistency for each foundation. These values are generally consistent with the values
reported in other studies that utilized the same measure (Graham et al. 2011), although some of
the alpha values were somewhat low.
To answer RQ1, I first checked the descriptive statistics of the data. I obtained mean,
standard deviation, and density plot of participants’ political orientation by sectors, positions, and

41
demographic attributes such as age, gender, and race. Then I conducted Kruskal-Wallis test
(Privitera 2017) to check for any statistically significant differences in political ideology across
sectors, positions, and demographic attributes. Based on the Kruskal-Wallis test results, to identify
which pairs show significant differences, I conducted Mann-Whitney U test for pairwise
comparisons with Benjamini-Hochberg adjustment for p-value (Benjamini and Hochberg 1995).
Finally, to examine each independent variable’s own impact on the dependent variable after
controlling the other variables, I conducted regression analyses. To conduct the regression
analyses, I dummy-coded the categorical variables. Table 3.2 shows how the variables were
dummy coded. I combined sectors with similar characteristics (e.g., types of products or services)
into larger categories to reduce the number of dummy variables that enter the regression models.
I also combined entry level, individual contributor, and project manager into the lower position
category, and mid-level manager, top-level manager, and executive/c-level into higher position
category. The same coding scheme was used for all regression analyses I conducted for this paper.

Table 3.2. Dummy Codded Independent Variables

Independent variable Reference group Other group(s)
Manufacturing a
Infrastructure b
Combined sector Computer/Electronics/IT
Consumer c
Others
Position Lower position d Higher position e
Older age f
Age Middle age
Younger age g
Gender Male Female
Asian
Race White
Others
a
Manufacturing: Automotive, Manufacturing-Other, Oil and Gas/Mining
b
Infrastructure: Construction, Government, Military/Defense/Aerospace, Transportation, Utilities
c
Consumer: Food, Healthcare, Retail, Consulting, Consumer Products
d
Lower position: Entry Level, Individual Contributor, Project Manager
e
Higher position: Mid-level Manager, Top-level Manager, Executive/C-Level
f
Older age: 50+ years
g
Younger age: Less than 30 years

I conducted generalized ordinal logistic regression analysis (Williams 2006; Williams 2016)
because the dependent variable (political ideology) was an ordinal variable; thus I could not use
multiple linear regression analysis. Ordinal logistic regression could have been an alternative, but
according to the Brant test (Brant 1990), the parallel regressions assumption, which is the core
assumption of the ordinal logistic regression, was violated (𝜒 2 =95.53, p < .001). Especially, I
applied the partial proportional odds model, which relaxes the parallel regressions assumption only

42
for the variables with the violated assumption (Williams 2006; Williams 2016) as a special case
of generalized ordinal logistic regression. Table 3.3 shows the Brant test results, and according to
the results, I can allow the coefficients of the independent variables to be fixed across the
cumulative logits except for the age and race variables.

Table 3.3. Results of Brant Test

Variables 𝜒2 p > 𝜒2
Overall model 95.53 <.001 ***
Combined sector (Referent: Computer/Electronics/IT)
Manufacturing 3.78 .465
Infrastructure 1.83 .876
Consumer 2.80 .794
Others 6.93 .757
Position (Referent: Lower position)
Higher position 4.01 .521
Age (Referent: Middle age)
Older age 12.03 .033 *
Younger age 13.79 .018 *
Gender (Referent: Male)
Female 2.40 .783
Race (Referent: White)
Asian 19.41 .002 **
Others 21.24 <.001 ***
*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

To answer RQ2, I created five sets of multiple linear regression models to identify what
factors, including sectors, positions, and demographic attributes such as age, gender, and race,
influence engineers’ five moral foundations, respectively. Prior to running the regression analyses
with those models, I checked four assumptions of linear regression analysis – linearity of the
relationship between dependent and independent variables, independence of variables, normal
distribution of residuals, and homoscedasticity. The results confirmed that our dataset meets the
assumptions, so I proceeded with the data analysis.
To answer RQ3, I conducted generalized ordinal logistic regression analysis (Williams
2006; Williams 2016) again, because the dependent variable political ideology was an ordinal
variable. Again, according to the Brant test (Brant 1990), the parallel regressions assumption was
violated (𝜒 2 =113.38, p < .01). Therefore, I conducted generalized ordinal logistic regression.
Specifically, I applied the partial proportional odds model, because I could allow the coefficients
of the independent variables to be fixed across the cumulative logits except for the age and race
variables, as the Table 3.4 shows the Brant test results.

43
 Table 3.4. Results of Brant Test
Variables 𝜒2 p > 𝜒2
Overall model 113.38 .003 **
Moral values
Care 1.56 .906
Fairness 3.76 .585
Loyalty 3.07 .689
Authority 3.26 .661
Purity 9.57 .088
Combined sector (Referent: Computer/Electronics/IT)
Manufacturing 3.94 .558
Infrastructure 2.99 .702
Consumer 3.71 .592
Others 8.25 .143
Position (Referent: Lower position)
Higher position 5.42 .367
Age (Referent: Middle age)
Older age 12.95 .024 *
Younger age 13.89 .016 *
Gender (Referent: Male)
Female 0.56 .990
Race (Referent: White)
Asian 17.61 .004 **
Others 20.49 .001 **
*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

I utilized R 4.0.3 for all statistical analyses in this paper, except the generalized ordinal
logistic regression analysis, which I performed with Stata/SE 16.1.

3.4 Results

RQ1: How do practicing engineers’ political ideologies vary across employment sectors,
organizational positions, and demographic attributes?
Table 3.5 shows the mean and standard deviation of the political ideology of all participants
and subgroups which were classified by sector, age, gender, race, and position at the participants’
workplaces. Also, Figure 3.1 shows the density plot of political ideology by sector (a), age (b),
gender (c), race (d), position (e), as well as combined sector (f). From top to bottom, the density
plots by sector, age, position, and combined sector are in increasing order of the mean value.

44
 Table 3.5. Mean and Standard Deviation of Political Ideology
Political Ideology Political Ideology
Mean (SD) Mean (SD)

All participants 3.80 (1.88) By Age

By Sector Less than 30 3.10 (1.58)
Retail 2.50 (1.18) 30-49 3.75 (1.78)
Computer/Electronics/IT 3.40 (1.76) 50+ 4.48 (2.02)
Consulting 3.43 (1.65) By Gender
Food 3.53 (1.64) Male 4.03 (1.90)
Healthcare 3.60 (1.87) Female 2.93 (1.54)
Consumer Products 3.64 (1.68) Others 3.44 (1.51)
Transportation 3.65 (1.42) By Race
Construction 3.68 (1.80) White 4.08 (2.02)
Utilities 3.72 (2.05) Asian 3.17 (1.48)
Government 3.81 (2.23) Others 3.71 (1.51)
Manufacturing – Othera 4.04 (2.07) Position
Military/Defense/Aerospace 4.05 (2.02) Entry level 3.26 (1.52)
Others 4.17 (1.84) Individual contributor 3.48 (1.77)
Oil and Gas/Mining 4.17 (2.22) Project manager 3.63 (1.86)
Automotive 4.39 (1.52) Mid-level manager 4.24 (2.01)
Top-level manager 4.28 (1.72)
Executive/C-level 4.51 (2.11)

Figure 3.1. Density plot of political ideology by sector (a), age (b), gender (c), race (d), position
(e), and combined sector (f). Cautious interpretation would be needed for small groups including
Sector – Retail, Consulting, Food, Transportation, Government; and Gender – Others.

45
 As discussed, before conducting regression analysis, I first conducted Kruskal-Wallis test
to check for any statistically significant differences in political ideology across sector, age, gender,
race, and position. The test result for sector showed there is no statistically significant difference
in engineers’ political ideology across sectors (𝜒 2 =19.339, df = 14, p = .152).
However, the test result for age showed there is a statistically significant difference in
engineers’ political ideology across age groups (𝜒 2 =35.544, df = 2, p < .001). The pairwise
differences were significant between the younger age group (less than 30) and middle age group
(30-49) (p =.002, r = .15), between younger age group and older age group (50+) (p <.001, r =.33),
and between middle age group and older age group (p < .001, r = .17). Here and in the following
results, p denotes adjusted p-value and r denotes effect size (r = .10 is small effect size; r = .30 is
medium effect size; r = .50 is large effect size; where r = Z/√𝑁). The test result for gender also
showed statistically significant difference across groups (𝜒 2 =27.652, df = 2, p < .001). The
pairwise differences were significant between male and female (p < .001, r = .22). The test result
for race also showed statistically significant difference (𝜒 2 =19.111, df = 2, p < .001). The
pairwise differences were significant between White and Asian groups (p < .001, r = .18) and
between Asian and Others (p = .021, r =.10). Finally, the test result for the position also showed
statistically significant difference (𝜒 2 = 23.06, df = 5, p < .001). The pairwise differences were
significant between entry level and mid-level manager (p = .041, r = .17), between entry level and
top-level manager (p = .021, r = .21), between entry level and executive/c-level (p = .020, r = .22),
between individual contributor and mid-level manager (p =.020, r = .13), between individual
contributor and top-level manager (p = .020, r = .13), between individual contributor and
executive/c-level (p = .016, r = .14), between project manager and top-level manager (p = .041, r
= .14), and between project manager and executive/c-level (p = .023, r = .16).
Table 3.6 shows the results of the partial proportional odds model. Model [1] estimates the
odds of selecting the category 2 (moderately liberal), category 3 (slightly liberal), category 4
(moderate), category 5 (slightly conservative), category 6 (moderately conservative), and category
7 (strongly conservative) over the category 1 (strongly liberal). Models [2]-[6] can be interpreted
similarly. For instance, Model [4] estimates the odds of selecting the category 5, category 6, and
category 7 over the category 1, category 2, category 3, and category 4. Except the Age and Race
variables, the estimated odds ratios of all the other independent variables were same across the
cumulative logits. For example, across the cumulative logits, working in the manufacturing sector

46
(OR = 1.66, p < .05) and being higher position in the workplace (OR = 1.46, p < .05) was positively
associated with political conservatism, and being female (OR = 0.41, p < .001) was negatively
associated with political conservatism.

Table 3.6. Results of Partial Proportional Odds Model

Odds Ratio (OR)
Variables [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Pr(x=2,3,4,5,6,7) / Pr(x=3,4,5,6,7) / Pr(x=4,5,6,7) / Pr(x=5,6,7) / Pr(x=6,7) / Pr(x=7) /
Pr(x=1) Pr(x=1,2) Pr(x=1,2,3) Pr(x=1,2,3,4) Pr(x=1,2,3,4,5) Pr(x=1,2,3,4,5,6)
Combined sector (Referent: Computer/Electronics/IT)
Manufacturing 1.66 * 1.66 * 1.66 * 1.66 * 1.66 * 1.66 *
Infrastructure 1.21 1.21 1.21 1.21 1.21 1.21
Consumer 1.14 1.14 1.14 1.14 1.14 1.14
Others 1.74 1.74 1.74 1.74 1.74 1.74
Position (Referent: Lower position)
Higher position 1.46 * 1.46 * 1.46 * 1.46 * 1.46 * 1.46 *
Age (Referent: Middle age)
Older age 0.68 1.11 1.82 * 1.62 * 1.62 a 1.90 *
Younger age 0.50 0.79 0.92 0.87 0.38 * 0.18 *
Gender (Referent: Male)
Female 0.41 *** 0.41 *** 0.41 *** 0.41 *** 0.41 *** 0.41 ***
Race (Referent: White)
Asian 1.59 0.76 0.79 0.28 *** 0.32 ** 0.34 *
Others 1.60 1.27 1.22 0.32 *** 0.51 0.77
2 .078
Pseudo R
*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
a
While not significant at .05 level, the p-value was .051, which is very close to the borderline.

For Age and Race, the odds ratio differed across the cumulative logits. For example, the
effect of being higher age (over 50) was not significant in the Model [1] and Model [2] but
significant in the Model [3] (OR = 1.82, p < .05), Model [4] (OR = 1.62, p < .05), and Model [6]
(OR = 1.90, p < .05). For the Model [5], the result was not significant at .05 level, but the p-value
was .051, which is very close to the borderline. Therefore, the result should be cautiously
interpreted. The effect of being lower age (less than 30) was not significant in the Model [1], Model
[2], Model [3], and Model [4] but significant in the Model [5] (OR = 0.38, p < .05) and Model [6]
(OR = 0.18, p < .05).
The effect of being Asian was not significant in the Model [1], Model [2], and Model [3]
but significant in the Model [4] (OR = 0.28, p < .001), Model [5] (OR = 0.32, p < .01), and Model
[6] (OR = 0.34, p < .05). The effect of one identifying their race as Other instead of White or Asian
was not significant in general, but significant in the Model [4] (OR = 0.32, p < .001). For further
reference, the result of the multiple linear regression analysis is also attached in Appendix A.

47
RQ2: How do practicing engineers’ moral foundations vary across employment sectors,
organizational positions, and demographic attributes?
Table 3.7 shows the results of the multiple linear regression analyses each of which has
Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity as a dependent variable. B denotes unstandardized
regression coefficients. Model 1 shows that sector, position, age, and identifying as a race/ethnicity
other than White or Asian are not significantly associated with the Care foundation score. However,
being female (𝐵 = 2.026, p < .001) and being Asian (𝐵 = 1.751, p < .01) are positively associated
with higher score in the Care foundation. Model 2 shows that sector, position, and age are not
significantly associated with the Fairness foundation score. However, being female (𝐵 = 1.554, p
< .001), being Asian (𝐵 = 1.664, p < .001), and identifying with a race/ethnicity other than White
or Asian (𝐵 = 1.174, p < .05) are positively associated with higher score in the Fairness foundation.

Table 3.7. Results of Multiple Linear Regression Analyses

Care Fairness Loyalty Authority Purity
Variables Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5
𝐵 𝐵 𝐵 𝐵 𝐵
Intercept 20.537 *** 20.623 *** 14.127 *** 13.463 *** 12.323 ***
Combined sector (Referent: Computer/Electronics/IT)
Manufacturing -1.214 -.004 1.561 * 1.577 * 1.402
Infrastructure -.409 -.552 .123 1.686 * 1.122
Consumer -.260 -.708 .310 1.677 * 1.046
Others .205 -.638 1.694 2.679 ** 2.646 *
Position (Referent: Lower position)
Higher position -.669 -.269 .405 .561 .972
Age (Referent: Middle age)
Older age .057 .187 .993 1.804 ** 2.354 ***
Younger age .306 .509 .064 .553 -.491
Gender (Referent: Male)
Female 2.026 *** 1.554 *** -1.831 ** -1.116 -.675
Race (Referent: White)
Asian 1.751 ** 1.664 *** 1.636 ** 1.617 ** 2.345 **
Others .768 1.174 * .401 .934 1.703 *
R2 .088 .073 .058 .055 .060
2 .070 .054 .038 .034 .041
Adj. R
*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Model 3 shows that position, age, and identifying with a race/ethnicity other than White or
Asian are not significantly associated with the Loyalty foundation score. However, working in the
manufacturing sector (𝐵 = 1.561, p < .05) and being Asian (𝐵 = 1.636, p < .01) are positively
associated with higher scores in the Loyalty foundation, and being female (𝐵 = -1.831, p < .01) is
negatively associated with higher scores in the Loyalty foundation. Model 4 shows that position,

48
being female, and identifying with a race other than White or Asian are not significantly associated
with the Authority foundation score. However, working in the manufacturing sector (𝐵 = 1.577, p
< .05), infrastructure sector (𝐵 = 1.686, p < .05), consumer sector (𝐵 = 1.677, p < .05), and others
sector (𝐵 = 2.679, p < .01) as well as being in a higher age group (𝐵 = 1.804, p < .01) and being
Asian (𝐵 = 1.617, p < .01) are positively associated with higher score in the Authority foundation.
Model 5 shows that position and being female are not significantly associated with the Purity
foundation score. However, working in others sector (𝐵 = 2.646, p < .05), being higher age group
(𝐵 = 2.354, p < .001), being Asian (𝐵 = 2.345, p < .01), and being other race beyond White and
Asian (𝐵 = 1.703, p < .05) are positively associated with higher score in the Purity foundation.

RQ3: How are practicing engineers’ political ideologies related to their moral foundations?
Table 3.8 shows the results of the partial proportional odds model. Except for the Age and
Race variables, the estimated odds ratios of all the other independent variables were same across
the cumulative logits. For example, across the cumulative logits, higher scores in the Care
foundation (OR = 0.89, p < .001) and Fairness foundation (OR = 0.89, p < .001) were negatively
associated with political conservatism. Higher scores in the Loyalty foundation (OR = 1.08, p
< .01), Authority foundation (OR = 1.10, p < .001), and Purity foundation (OR = 1.10, p < .001)
were positively associated with political conservatism. Also, and being female (OR = 0.65, p < .05)
was negatively associated with political conservatism.

49
 Table 3.8. Results of Partial Proportional Odds Model
Odds Ratio
Variables [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Pr(x=2,3,4,5,6,7) / Pr(x=3,4,5,6,7) / Pr(x=4,5,6,7) / Pr(x=5,6,7) / Pr(x=6,7) / Pr(x=7) /
Pr(x=1) Pr(x=1,2) Pr(x=1,2,3) Pr(x=1,2,3,4) Pr(x=1,2,3,4,5) Pr(x=1,2,3,4,5,6)
Moral values
Care 0.89 *** 0.89 *** 0.89 *** 0.89 *** 0.89 *** 0.89 ***
Fairness 0.89 *** 0.89 *** 0.89 *** 0.89 *** 0.89 *** 0.89 ***
Loyalty 1.08 ** 1.08 ** 1.08 ** 1.08 ** 1.08 ** 1.08 **
Authority 1.10 *** 1.10 *** 1.10 *** 1.10 *** 1.10 *** 1.10 ***
Purity 1.10 *** 1.10 *** 1.10 *** 1.10 *** 1.10 *** 1.10 ***
Combined sector (Referent: Computer/Electronics/IT)
Manufacturing 1.23 1.23 1.23 1.23 1.23 1.23
Infrastructure 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00
Consumer 0.88 0.88 0.88 0.88 0.88 0.88
Others 1.20 1.20 1.20 1.20 1.20 1.20
Position (Referent: Lower position)
Higher position 1.18 1.18 1.18 1.18 1.18 1.18
Age (Referent: Middle age)
Older age 0.49 0.79 1.61 1.26 1.20 1.46
Younger age 0.40 * 0.78 1.02 1.01 0.42 * 0.26
Gender (Referent: Male)
Female 0.65 * 0.65 * 0.65 * 0.65 * 0.65 * 0.65 *
Race (Referent: White)
Asian 1.16 0.56 * 0.68 0.20 *** 0.27 *** 0.28 *
Others 1.13 1.19 1.25 0.27 *** 0.55 0.99
2 .205
Pseudo R
*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

However, the Age and Race variables showed difference in OR across the cumulative logits.
For example, the effect of being lower age (less than 30) was not significant in the Model [2],
Model [3], Model [4], and Model [6] but significant in the Model [1] (OR = 0.40, p < .05) and
Model [5] (OR = 0.42, p < .05).
The effect of being Asian was not significant in the Model [1] and Model [3] but significant
in the Model [2] (OR = 0.56, p < .05), Model [4] (OR = 0.20, p < .001), Model [5] (OR = 0.27, p
< .001), and Model [6] (OR = 0.28, p < .05). The effect of identifying with a race/ethnicity other
than White or Asian was not significant in general, but significant in the Model [4] (OR = 0.27, p
< .001). I can also confirm that by adding the five moral foundations variables to the model, the
pseudo R2 increased from .078 (see Table 3.5) to .205 (see Table 3.8). For further reference, the
result of the multiple linear regression analysis is also attached in Appendix B.

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 3.5 Discussion

In this section, I summarize our outcomes for each research question, and I compare our
findings with the results of previous research.
To address RQ1, I examined descriptive statistics of the data, conducted Kruskal-Wallis
tests, and conducted generalized ordinal logistic regression analyses. The results showed that for
the political ideology across employment sectors, the contrast between the manufacturing sectors
(including automotive, other manufacturing sectors, and oil and gas) and the
computer/electronics/IT sector was most evident. Except for the small retail sector, the
computer/electronics/IT sector showed the most liberal political ideology on average (M = 3.40).
By contrast, the automotive sector showed the most conservative political ideology on average (M
= 4.39), followed by oil and gas/mining (M = 4.17), others (M = 4.17), military/defense/aerospace
(M = 4.05), and manufacturing-other (M = 4.04). Further, according to the regression results, when
other factors including position and demographic attributes are controlled, engineers who are
working in the manufacturing sector are more likely to hold a conservative political ideology
compared to the engineers who are working in the computer/electronics/IT sector. This result
comports with the prior research by Bonica (2014), who showed that the online computer-services
industry, which includes Google and Facebook, tends to be left-leaning, while oil, gas, and coal
and mining industries are right-leaning. Bonica did not specifically focus on engineers, however.
These results suggest that characteristics of various industrial sectors are associated with
the political ideology of employees in the industry. Since this study is correlational, however, I
cannot determine the direction of causation: whether the industrial characteristics impact engineers’
ideology or whether engineers self-select into the sectors whose ideology aligns with their own.
As discussed in the literature review, existing literature about the engineering profession
and engineering culture have described engineering as a conservative profession either directly or
indirectly (Riley 2008; Nieusma and Blue 2012; Cech 2013). However, as I have shown, engineers
work in various sectors whose work environments are very different, and there are subgroups of
engineers that more or less endorse conservative or liberal political ideologies, in part predicted
by their employment sectors. While there can be some commonalities across engineers in different
fields and sectors, it would be helpful to examine differences across engineers in different sectors
for a deeper understanding of engineering practice. Explaining the reasons for the differences in

51
political ideology across sectors was out of the scope of this paper. A follow-up study could
compare the most highly contrasting sectors.
Another interesting finding was the association between engineers’ political ideology and
their position in their workplace organizations. According to the regression results, after
controlling the employment sector and demographic attributes, engineers with higher positions in
their workplaces (at or above the mid-level manager level) are more likely to identify as
conservative as compared to engineers in lower positions. Since the regression analysis controlled
for age, the differences between positions cannot be attributed to age. This finding again raises an
interesting chicken-and-egg problem: Are engineers with more conservative political ideology
more likely to be promoted into higher positions, or do engineers become more conservative as
they are promoted into higher positions? In their study about the political ideology of physicians,
Bonica et al. (2014) raised similar questions regarding differences in partisanship across physicians’
specialties. For example, surgeons contribute 48.1% more to Republican Party than pediatricians
do. Bonica et al. explain that while one possible explanation can be that this difference purely
follows economic interests (therefore, surgeons become more conservative after they select their
specialty), another explanation can be that students with Republican preferences select surgical
specialties, as supported by Frank et al., (2007)’s study. A follow-up study could test whether
endorsement of conservative political ideologies improves engineers’ promotion in their
workplaces, and how the fact varies across sectors with different ideological atmospheres.
To answer the RQ2, I conducted multiple regression analysis. According to the results,
after controlling for position in the workplace and demographic attributes, engineers in the
manufacturing sector showed higher endorsement of the Loyalty foundation than engineers in the
computer/electronics/IT sector. Engineers in the manufacturing, infrastructure, consumer, and
others sectors all showed higher endorsement of the Authority foundation than engineers in the
computer/electronics/IT sector. Also, engineers in the others sector showed higher endorsement of
Purity foundation than the engineers in the computer/electronics/IT sector. But there were no
significant differences by sector in the Care and Fairness foundations. However, it is noteworthy
that engineers from the manufacturing sectors showed significantly higher endorsement of Loyalty
and Authority foundations than engineers from computer/electronics/IT sector, and this difference
may partially explain one of the findings from the RQ1 – engineers from manufacturing sectors
are more conservative than engineers from computer/electronics/IT sector. This interpretation

52
aligns with Graham et al. (2009), who showed that conservatives value Loyalty, Authority, and
Purity more than liberals. Indeed, the impact of moral foundations in engineers’ political ideology
became more evident in RQ3, as I will discuss further below.
I found that Asian engineers showed higher endorsement of all five moral foundations as
compared to White engineers, after controlling for sector, position, and other demographic
attributes. The finding implies that, at least according to the figures, that Asian engineers consider
all five moral foundations as more important criteria for making moral judgments as compared to
White engineers. In fact, the motivation behind the establishment of the Moral Foundations Theory
was Haidt (2012)’s visit to India and his experience of cultural differences, which was inspired by
Shweder et al. (1987)’s cultural study on morality. Shweder et al. (1987) argued that compared to
the educated population in the United States, Indians have a broader moral domain. Therefore, it
is not surprising that Asian groups show higher endorsement of the other moral foundations of
Loyalty, Authority, and Purity, especially considering that typically (and only) Care and Fairness
are explicitly emphasized in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic)
cultures when discussing morality. However, considering that Asian groups also showed higher
endorsement of Care and Fairness foundations, it can be also possible that cultural differences
caused different interpretations of the survey items. Future research may be needed to further
explore these possibilities, such as by conducting a measurement invariant analysis to check
whether the survey items are interpreted differently by the different demographic groups. However.
I could not conduct such analysis due to the limited sample size. A follow-up study would be
necessary to identify the reasons for this difference.
To answer RQ3, I again conducted a generalized ordinal logistic regression. One
noteworthy result was that while the manufacturing sectors showed more conservative tendencies
than the computer/electronics/IT sector in RQ1, after adding the five moral foundations as
independent variables in the regression model, this difference disappeared. It means that moral
foundations mostly explain the variance in political ideology among employment sectors. Based
on the results, a follow-up study could examine what aspects of the industrial culture affect the
differences in engineers’ endorsement of the five moral foundations. Consistent with the findings
from Graham et al. (2009), our results also showed that Care and Fairness foundations are
positively associated with political liberalism, whereas Loyalty, Authority, and Purity foundations
are positively associated with political conservatism.

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 3.6 Limitations and Future Work

The first limitation of this study lies in the sample. While I tried our best to collect data
through various channels, the majority of the data was obtained through social media platforms,
especially LinkedIn. Therefore, the majority of the study participants are active LinkedIn users,
which may not accurately represent a more general population of engineers. Moreover, since the
survey participation was completely voluntary, engineers who were interested in the topic and
engineers who were more open to participating in this kind of research study were necessarily self-
selected. Those issues raise questions about the representativeness of the study sample. However,
even with the limitation, it is noteworthy that our sample covers diverse demographic groups and
resembles the national-level demographics for the profession (“Engineer Statistics and Facts in the
US” 2021; Roy 2019), although with slight overrepresentation of Asian engineers.
Another limitation is the small number of respondents in some subgroups. Since one of the
purposes of this study was to provide a broad overview of differences in political orientation and
moral foundations among engineers across various sectors, I invited engineers from various sectors
rather than limiting the number of the sectors for investigation. While this approach led to
obtaining information from engineers in various sectors, this led to limiting the number of
engineers representing each sector. For example, in the retail sector, there were only ten engineers.
Since I later combined sectors into five broader sectors (computer/electronics/IT, manufacturing,
infrastructure, consumer, and others), the regression results may be less biased. However, readers
should cautiously interpret differences between small subgroups and other subgroups in Table 5
and Figure 1. Future studies with larger samples would be needed to check the accuracy of these
differences.
The second limitation is our measure of political ideology. While the political self-
placement item has been widely used with some validity evidence, some scholars have criticized
the measure. For example, Kitschelt and Hellemans (1990) reported that people’s answers to the
political self-placement item are often misaligned with their policy positions, while the answers
are more accurate among political elites. Participants can misplace their position because there is
a wide range of interpretations of the measure. While the political self-placement item benefits
from its simplicity, future research could use a more sophisticated, reliable measure of political
ideology.

54
 While this study fulfilled its purpose of exploring political ideology and moral foundations
of practicing engineers across the sector, position, and demographic attributes, I did not examine
how such differences are reflected in their actual work practices and/or other types of activities
they undertake in their professional or personal lives. Follow-up studies that delve into the reason
and impact of such differences would be necessary. Assuming that organizational culture and
personality traits affect engineers’ moral foundations, I am also preparing a companion paper that
complement this study’s findings [Chapter 4].

3.7 Conclusion

In this paper, I reported the results of our exploratory study about engineering practitioners’
political ideology and moral foundations. I highlighted the differences in political ideology and
moral foundations across the subgroups of our study participants and showed that engineers
working in the manufacturing sectors are more politically conservative than engineers working in
the computer/electronics/IT sector. I found that engineers in higher positions in their workplaces
were also more politically conservative than engineers in lower positions in their workplaces, and
female engineers were more politically liberal than male engineers, after controlling for other
personal attributes. I also showed that engineers’ endorsements of the five moral foundations differ
by sector and demographic attributes (age, gender, and race). Finally, I showed that engineers’
moral foundations considerably explain their political ideology, consistent with previous studies
involving Moral Foundations Theory.
Due to the inherently political nature of engineering practice, engineering ethics scholars
have argued that engineering ethics education also needs to include concerns related to broader
societal context, such as political engagement (Mitcham 2009; Conlon 2008). However, there have
been few investigations regarding the main active agents of such political engagement –
engineering practitioners. When emphasizing the importance of ideological analysis of current
corporate social responsibility movement in the business settings, Spector (2008) said, “[…] doing
well by doing good can lead to goals not shared by every advocate. Today’s enthusiasm over doing
well by doing good needs to be contained within a critical context—one that demands analysis and
debate and makes transparent and debatable not just the goals of the agenda but also the process
by which those goals are set” (333). Better understandings of political ideology and moral
foundations of practicing engineers would establish a good starting point for finding common goals

55
that many engineers can advocate together. In that sense, this study contributes to discussions
around the normative goals of engineering practice, including currently predominant and future
aspirational goals for the profession.

3.8 Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the Dale and Suzi Gallagher Professorship in
Engineering Education at Purdue University. This material is also based upon work supported by
the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2024301.

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 IMPACT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND
PERSONALITY TRAITS ON THE POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES AND
MORAL FOUNDATIONS OF ENGINEERS

4.1 Introduction

The work of professionals intrinsically involves moral or ethical considerations, as some

definitions of professions and professional practice reflect. For example, Abbot (1988) defined
professions as “somewhat exclusive groups of individuals applying somewhat abstract knowledge
to particular cases” (p. 318) with “elaborate systems of instruction and training […] [as well as an
enforced] code of ethics or behavior” (p. 4). Spillman and Brophy (2018) also argued that
professional practice is based on “a sense of craft which expresses moral agency in work” (p. 163).
Reflecting the fact, many professions have their own codes of ethics. As an example, in their codes
of ethics, the National Society of Professional Engineers emphasizes that engineering
professionals shall “hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public” (NSPE, 2021).
The ethical considerations of professions connect to political considerations because the
scope of professional ethics extends beyond the issues associated with daily practice of individuals
(e.g., accepting bribes) to the issues associated with collective social responsibility of the
profession (Herkert, 2001; Herkert, 2005). An essential question associated with the collective
social responsibility is how to contribute to the common good of a society with professional
expertise. Here, what the common good is and what a good society means relate to issues of
political ideology (Spector, 2008). Synergistic with this line of thought, Spence et al. (2017) argued
that professionals “should take politics more seriously” (p. 261) and investigated political leanings
of the UK “professional class” (p. 262), especially because they “operate in or around the
‘command posts of the economy’ (Wright Mills, 1956)” (p. 261).
However, today, professionals contribute to the common good largely through the
organizations where they are employed, because many professionals now work in an
organizational setting (Evetts, 2013; Adams, 2020) – especially, in a relatively larger, bureaucratic
organization. As such, the condition of their work may frequently inhibit professionals from
performing with full autonomy (Noordegraaf, 2015; Conlon, 2008), and thus considering the
dominant political ideologies in their workplaces (e.g., corporations) becomes very important in
discussing the politics of a profession. Therefore, I examined engineering professionals’ political

57
ideology and moral foundations across their employment sectors in myprevious study [Chapter 3].
In that study, I prevent evidence showing how engineers’ political ideology and moral foundations
vary across their employment sectors.
A few remaining questions include what specific features or characteristics of various
employment sectors relate to engineers’ endorsement of political ideologies and moral foundations
and how. One possible explanation can be that some common organizational cultures in each
employment sector interact with the individuals: I assume the important interactions between
organizational cultures and political ideologies and moral foundations of engineers because I
observed that engineers’ ethical values and behaviors are largely influenced by the culture of the
organizations where they work (Kim, Hess, & Fila, 2020; Kim & Hess, under review). However,
previous research has not explored the interactions I assumed. Based on existing literature on
political and moral psychology, as discussed in the following section, I expect that the influences
of organizational culture are exerted through the interaction with the personality traits of the
engineers.
I specifically focused on engineers for this study because engineers have a long tradition
of being employed in an organizational setting (Adams, 2020) rather than working with full
autonomy. Therefore, by focusing on engineers, I can provide meaningful insights for other
professions who have similar work conditions (e.g., accountants), beyond professions with more
autonomous work conditions such as medicine and law. Also, the work of engineers varies across
a wide range of different employment sectors including IT, healthcare, oil and gas, and
construction, thus covering a wide range of different organizational cultures by focusing on a
single professional domain. Moreover, while engineering is the largest profession in the U.S.,
research studies involving the professions have not focused much on engineers.

4.2 Literature Review

Caprara (2007) argued that individuals’ political choices have been increasingly depending
on their personal characteristics, such as personality traits and values. Indeed, numerous studies
have investigated the relationships between individuals’ personality traits, moral values, and
political ideologies. Here I introduce previous studies that have explored these relationships, as
well as hypotheses developed based on such studies. Since it is especially not known whether the

58
findings from research on general populations apply to specific groups of professionals, such as
engineers, I also discuss my expectations for the present study’s primary target population.

4.2.1 Relationships between personality traits and political ideology

Studies in political psychology have repeatedly shown the relationships between political
ideology and the Big Five personality traits (Extraversion, Openness, Conscientiousness,
Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) (McCrae and Costa, 1999). For example, based on their study
with six different samples, Carney et al. (2008) concluded that there is a significant positive
relationship between Openness and political liberalism and between Conscientiousness and
political conservatism. Other studies have also reported consistent findings, including studies with
cross-cultural samples (Sibley et al., 2012; Gerber et al., 2010; Gerber et al., 2011; Kireger et al.,
2019; Vecchione et al., 2011). Therefore, in my study with engineers, I expect to find similar
results for the Openness and Conscientiousness.
Unlike Openness and Conscientiousness, however, there has been no consistent evidence
about the relationships between Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism and political
ideology (Carney et al., 2008). Studies have reported mixed results based on the samples and
accompanying political contexts, e.g., see Vecchione et al. (2011) and Krieger et al. (2019). Thus,
I cannot make any strong hypotheses about those three personality traits. But as this study also
considers engineers’ morality as an important dimension of exploration, focusing specifically on
Agreeableness could provide interesting insights. The following paragraphs will explain more
about this line of reasoning.
As John et al. (2008) state, Agreeableness “contrasts a prosocial and communal orientation
toward others with antagonism and includes traits such as altruism, tender-mindedness, trust, and
modesty” (p. 120). Due to the traits associated with Agreeableness, it is intuitive that the trait
Agreeableness is related to morality. Indeed, Walker (1999)’s study of the personality traits
associated with moral maturity showed that Agreeableness is one of the dominant factors in
people’s personality descriptions of moral exemplars. Interestingly, DeYoung et al. (2007)
suggested that the Agreeableness personality trait further includes the subtraits of compassion and
politeness, and Hirsh et al. (2010) argued that those two subtraits are associated with different
political ideologies: the compassion aspect of Agreeableness is positively associated with

59
liberalism and egalitarianism, whereas the politeness aspect of Agreeableness is positively
associated with conservatism and traditionalism.
As Agreeableness encompasses subtraits that are related to different political ideologies,
aligned with previous studies, I expect that Agreeableness and political ideology are not correlated
with each other. However, I expect that Agreeableness is correlated with both Individualizing and
Binding in the moral foundations framework, which I define and explain in more detail in the
following subsection.

4.2.2 Moral foundations’ relationships with personality traits and political ideology

Moral Foundations Theory has often been used to explain differences in people’s political
ideology relative to their endorsement of different moral values (Graham et al., 2009; Lewis &
Bates, 2011). The theory explains that individuals’ moral judgments are primed by five distinct
moral foundations – Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity (Haidt, 2012). Since individuals
endorse those five moral foundations differently, they can reach different judgments for the same
issue.
Graham et al. (2009) later classified the Care and Fairness foundations as a higher-order
Individualizing moral foundation and Loyalty, Authority, and Purity foundations as another
higher-order Binding moral foundation (note the “foundation” after Individualizing and Binding
are singular because those are also defined as a factor – referred to as a foundation – in factor
analysis). They documented the positive associations between Individualizing moral foundation
and political liberalism and between Binding moral foundation and political conservatism. This
finding has been also replicated in other studies (Lewis & Bates, 2011).
Based on previous empirical studies (Lewis & Bates, 2011; Hirsh et al., 2010), Graham et
al. (2013) suggested that personality traits are related to moral foundations. For example, they
suggested that the Individualizing foundation is positively associated with Openness and
Neuroticism, while the Binding foundation is positively associated with Conscientiousness and
Extraversion. They also suggested that Agreeableness is positively associated with both the
Individualizing foundation and the Binding foundation.
To sum, associations between personality traits and moral foundations, and between moral
foundations and political ideology, have been reported for general population. Therefore, in my
study with engineers, I will check whether the general associations also hold for the specific

60
population of engineers. Specifically, I expect that Openness, Neuroticism, and Agreeableness are
correlated with the Individualizing foundation, which is also correlated with political liberalism. I
also hypothesize that Extraversion, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness are correlated with the
Binding foundation, which is also correlated with political conservatism.

4.2.3 Cultural influence

As I have discussed, prior studies have demonstrated relationships between the Big Five
personality traits and moral foundations, and between the Big Five personality traits and political
ideology. However, such relationships often seem to be moderated by the cultural contexts where
individuals are embedded.
For example, Alper & Yilmaz (2019) argued that the relationships between the Big Five
personality traits and moral foundations are moderated by the national culture. They hypothesized
that the WEIRDness (Western, Educated, Individualized, Democratic, and Rich) level of a country
would impact the relationships between the Big Five personality traits and moral foundations.
They tested their hypotheses with individuals from 30 different countries, which could be further
classified into WEIRD countries (e.g., USA, UK) and non-WEIRD countries (e.g., China, India).
One of their findings suggested that while Agreeableness was positively associated with both the
Individualizing and Binding foundations in their study, the association between Agreeableness and
Individualizing foundation was stronger in WEIRD cultures. Their findings align with McAdams
(2009), who argued that individuals’ moral personalities are situated in cultural contexts (see also
McAdams & Pals, 2006).
However, it is not known whether such relationships are also moderated by other cultural
considerations, such as the organizational cultures of individuals’ workplaces. Engineers work in
various sectors with significantly different working environments, and in my previous study
(Chapter 3), I reported that engineers’ endorsement of moral foundations varies across their
employment sectors. As the characteristics of the sectors where organizations are embedded
influence the culture of those same organizations (Gordon, 1991; Chatman & Jehn, 1994; Blinded
for Review, under review; Brodbeck et al., 2004), I propose that organizational cultures may
provide important insights to explain the differences in the moral foundations of engineers.
The Competing Values Framework of Cameron and Quinn (2011) uses two dimensions of
organizational core values to define four types of organizational cultures. One dimension is the

61
organization's work approach, which ranges from stability to flexibility. The other dimension is
the organization's focus, which ranges from internal to external. These two dimensions intersect
to define four quadrants (see Figure 4.1). Cameron and Quinn further suggested that each quadrant
represents a unique organizational culture type, which they named Clan, Adhocracy, Market, and
Hierarchy cultures.

Figure 4.1. Competing Values Framework (from Cameron & Quinn, 2011)

In the Clan culture, the workplace is like an extended family. Organizations with the Clan
culture type emphasize long-term human development, as well as employees’ loyalty and
commitment to their organizations. In the Adhocracy culture, the workplace is a dynamic and
entrepreneurial place. The organizations with the Adhocracy culture emphasize taking risk and
commitment to innovation. In the Market culture, the workplace is a results-oriented place.
Organizations with the Market culture emphasize winning in the marketplace and making profits.
Lastly, in the Hierarchy culture, the workplace is characterized by a formalized and structured
environment. Organizations with the Hierarchy culture emphasize stability, efficiency, and
predictability in their systems.
Different organizational culture types also seem to have different impacts on ethical
practices of an organization’s employees. For example, Nguyen et al. (2021) investigated the
ethical judgment and ethical intention of accountants across different organizational culture types.
They found that the accountants from the Hierarchy culture and the Clan culture are more likely
to act on ethical decisions than accountants from the Adhocracy and the Market culture. And in a

62
study that more generally explored the relationship between the specific organizational culture
types and ethical practice in workplaces, Pasricha et al. (2018) investigated the mediating effect of
Clan culture and Adhocracy culture on the relationship between ethical leadership and corporate
social responsibility. They found that ethical leadership favors the formation of Clan and
Adhocracy cultures, which in turn positively impacts the organizations’ corporate social
responsibility practices.
Likewise, previous studies have suggested that organizational cultures impact employees’
ethics, but few studies have delved into the mechanisms of the impact. Since individuals’
personality traits interact with national culture in shaping their moral foundations, I expect the
relationship between personality traits and moral foundations would also be moderated by the
organizational culture of the workplace of engineers.

4.2.4 Moral personality

So far, I have discussed the relationships between individual pairs of variables -- including
Big Five personality traits, moral foundations, political ideology, and organizational cultures.
However, relationships between pairs of variables alone cannot provide a holistic understanding
because these variables interact in complex ways. Here I review some studies which have
examined these more complex types of interactions.
To begin, Lewis and Bates (2011) argued that while individuals’ personality traits impact
their political ideologies, the impacts are exerted largely via moral values. In other words, moral
values mediate the relationships between personality traits and political ideologies. Considering
this claim, they constructed a structural equation model with the Big Five personality framework
for personality traits, Moral Foundations Theory for moral values, and a single dimension of
liberal-conservative ideology for political ideology, and supported their model with empirical data.
For example, they showed that while there is a direct impact of personality trait Openness on one’s
endorsement of political liberalism, there is also an indirect impact of Openness on political
liberalism, which is mediated by the Individualizing moral value. Supporting such a mediating role
of moral values, Caprara et al. (2006) also showed that moral values substantially explain the
variance in participants’ political choice, trumping personality traits.
Based on the literature, I hypothesize the multi-level relationships across practicing
engineers’ personality traits, moral foundations, and political ideology. In fact, McAdams (2009)

63
suggested a similar multi-level conceptualization of individuals’ morality, which he called moral
personality. His model emphasizes that moral personality is situated in cultural contexts.
Therefore, I hypothesize a model where the impact of personality traits on political ideology is
mediated by moral foundations, which is consistent with Lewis and Bates (2011), and the
personality traits-political ideology relationship and the personality traits-moral foundations
relationship are moderated by the organizational cultures, which is consistent with McAdams
(2009)’s emphasis on the cultural influence. Since I consider the moderation of organizational
culture, I again focus on Agreeableness for the personality trait. Figure 4.2 shows the hypothesized
model.

Figure 4.2. Hypothesized Model of the Relationships across Personality Traits, Moral Foundations,
and Political Ideology, embedded in Organizational Culture

4.3 Research Questions

In summary, and considering the literature reviewed above, this study addresses the
following research questions:

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 RQ1: How are engineering professionals’ Big Five personality traits, moral foundations, and
political ideology associated with each other?
RQ2: How does organizational culture moderate the relationships between engineers’
personality traits and moral foundations?
RQ3: How does organizational culture moderate the relationships between engineers’
personality traits and political ideology?
RQ4: Does the hypothesized model of personality traits, moral foundations, political ideology,
and organizational culture properly explain the observed data?
By answering RQ1, I can confirm if the previous findings about the relationships between
individuals’ personality traits, moral foundations, and political ideologies apply to the population
of engineering professionals surveyed for this study. By answering RQ2 and RQ3, I can confirm
whether the relationships among variables I identified in the RQ1 are impacted by the culture of
the organizations where engineers work. Finally, by answering RQ4, I can get a more complete
picture regarding the interactions between the variables not considered in RQ1, RQ2, and RQ3.

4.4 Methods

4.4.1 Data collection

Measures. I collected data by using published survey instruments for measuring

personality traits, moral foundations, and organizational culture. For the personality traits, I
utilized the Big Five Personality Inventory (John et al., 1991), which consists of 44 items with five
dimensions – Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness. The
measure asks participants to rate the extent they think each given statement describes themselves.
For example, participants are given statements like “I see myself as someone who is talkative” and
asked to respond using a 5-point Likert scale (1 = disagree strongly, 2 = disagree a little, 3 = neither
agree nor disagree, 4 = agree a little, 5 = agree strongly). For my data, the values of Cronbach’s
alpha for Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness were 0.86,
0.74, 0.77, 0.80, and 0.79 respectively, which suggest very good (Extraversion and Neuroticism)
or good (Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness) level of internal consistency.
To measure moral foundations, I utilized the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ)
(Graham et al., 2009), which consists of 32 items with five dimensions - Care, Fairness, Loyalty,

65
Authority, Purity – and which can be further grouped into Individualizing and Binding foundations.
The first half of the measure asks participants to rate the extent they think the given considerations
(e.g., “whether or not someone suffered emotionally”) are relevant when deciding if something is
right or wrong, and the second half of the measure asks participants to rate the extent they agree
with each given statement (e.g., “compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial
virtue”). The survey participants are asked to answer with 6-pint Likert scale (The first half: 0 =
not at all relevant, 1 = not very relevant, 2 = slightly relevant, 3 = somewhat relevant, 4 = very
relevant, 5= extremely relevant; The second half: 0 = strongly disagree, 1 = moderately disagree,
2 = slightly disagree, 3 = slightly agree, 4 = moderately agree, 5 = strongly agree). To calculate
the Individualizing score, I summed the scores on the items for the Care and Fairness. For the
Binding score, I summed the scores on the items for the Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. For my
data, Cronbach’s alpha for Individualizing and Binding were 0.75 and 0.87 respectively, which
suggest a good (Individualizing) or very good (Binding) level of internal consistency.
For the organizational culture measure, I utilized the Organizational Culture Assessment
Instrument (OCAI) (Cameron & Quinn, 2011), which consists of 24 items with four dimensions –
Clan, Adhocracy, Market, and Hierarchy. The measure asks participants to rate six aspects of the
organization (dominant characteristics, organizational leadership, management of employees,
organizational glue, strategic emphases, and criteria of success) for each culture type. For example,
participants are given statements like “The organization is a very personal place. It is like an
extended family. People seem to share a lot of themselves” and asked to respond using a 5-point
Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree a little, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 4 = agree a
little, 5 = strongly agree). For my data, the Cronbach’s alpha values for Clan, Adhocracy, Market,
and Hierarchy were 0.86, 0.87, 0.82, and 0.75 respectively, which suggest very good (Clan,
Adhocracy, Market) or good (Hierarchy) levels of internal consistency.
For political ideology, I used a single, 7-point Likert scale measure (1 = strongly liberal, 2
= moderately liberal, 3 = slightly liberal, 4 = neutral, 5 = slightly conservative, 6 = moderately
conservative, 7 = strongly conservative) for compatibility with previous studies (e.g., Graham et
al., 2009; Alper & Yilmaz, 2019). The survey also included extensive demographic questions for
participants’ age, gender, race/ethnicity, and work experience (e.g., employment sector). The
survey was designed to take about 20 minutes to complete.

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 Participants. As previously described in Kim et al. (2021b), I distributed the survey to
engineering practitioners who are working in various employment sectors through social media
(e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter) and alumni associations of my institution in the fall of 2020. There were
four recruitment criteria for the survey: 1) holding at least one degree (BS or higher) in
engineering, technology, or a related field, 2) earned bachelor’s degree more than 3 years ago (as
of September 2020), 3) currently working full time in industry as an engineer or other technical
professional, including management (or, if currently unemployed, worked full time in industry as
an engineer or other technical professional recently), and 4) the United States is the current country
of residence. At the end of the survey, survey participants could submit their contact information
voluntarily, to be entered into a drawing for a $100 Amazon gift card. Odds of winning was 1 in
20. As a result, 651 engineering practitioners completed the survey at least partially, and 518 of
them completed the survey to the end. I excluded three of the 518 from the dataset, because they
did not meet the inclusion criteria. Therefore, for this study, a total of 515 survey responses could
be utilized for the analysis. Table 3.1 shows the demographic information of the 515 survey
respondents.

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 Table 4.1. Participant Demographic Information (N=515)
Demographic Variables n % Demographic Variables n %
Age Sector
Less than 30 130 25 Automotive 38 7
30 – 49 231 45 Computer/Electronics/IT 87 17
50+ (more than 50) 154 30 Construction 34 7
Gender Food 15 3
Male 405 79 Government 16 3
Female 101 20 Healthcare 35 7
Others1 9 1 Manufacturing – Other3 76 15
Race Military/Defense/Aerospac
40 8
e
White/Caucasian 312 61 Oil and Gas/Mining 35 7
Asian or Asian American 123 24 Retail 10 2
Others2 80 16 Transportation 20 4
Position Utilities 29 6
Entry level 34 7 Consulting 14 3
Individual contributor 189 37 Consumer Products 25 5
Project manager 105 20 Others 41 8
Mid-level manager 76 15 Academic Degree(s) Achieved
Top-level manager 58 11 Bachelor’s degree 515 100
Executive/C-level 53 10 Master’s degree 226 44
PhD degree 59 11
Other professional degrees4 76 15
1
Including “Prefer not to answer” (7 responses = 1% of total)
2
Including Hispanic or Latino/a (21 responses = 4% of total), Black or African American (18 responses = 3% of
total), mixed race (24 responses = 5% of total), American Indian or Alaska Native (2 responses = 0% of total), and
Prefer not to answer (15 responses = 3% of total)
3
Manufacturing-Other means all the other manufacturing businesses including machinery and metal products
manufacturing beyond the manufacturing of the other listed sectors in the table (e.g., automotive manufacturing,
electronics manufacturing)
4
Including MBA, JD, MD

4.4.2 Data analysis

Among the 515 responses, ten responses had one to two items of missing data. In other
words, the percentage of the missing data in my dataset was very small (less than 2%). In general,
it is perceived that the results of statistical analysis can be biased when the amount of missing data
are large (greater than 10%) (Bennett, 2001). However, since my dataset has only less than 2% of
missing data, I decided to use listwise deletion for all subsequent data analyses.
To answer RQ1, I examined the bivariate correlations between the Big Five personality
traits, moral foundations, and political ideology.

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 To answer RQ2, I conducted moderated regression analyses (Hayes, 2018). Specifically, I
tested the moderating effect of each organizational culture type (Clan, Adhocracy, Market, and
Hierarchy) on the relationships between Agreeableness and each moral foundation
(Individualizing and Binding foundation). For example, I tested moderating effect of the Clan
culture on the relationship between Agreeableness and Individualizing foundation. When doing
the analysis, I controlled for years in current organization by including it as an independent variable
in each regression model to examine the moderating effect of the organizational culture regardless
of the period of exposure to the culture. Each individual’s years of work in their current
organization varied from less than one year to thirty-seven years (M = 6.37, SD = 7.33). Figure
4.3 shows the graphical representation of the model I tested.

Figure 4.3. A graphical representation of the model I tested. While not depicted, there were two
moral foundations (Individualizing and Binding), and four organizational cultures (Clan,
Adhocracy, Market, and Hierarchy), and each combination of those variables was tested
separately.

To answer RQ3, I again conducted moderated regression analyses (Hayes, 2018).

Specifically, I tested the moderating effect of each organizational culture type (Clan, Adhocracy,
Market, Hierarchy) on the relationship between Agreeableness and political ideology. Similar to
the RQ3 analysis, I controlled for each respondent’s years in their current organization. Figure 4.4
shows the graphical representation of the model I tested.

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Figure 4.4. A graphical representation of the model I tested. While not depicted, there were four
organizational cultures (Clan, Adhocracy, Market, and Hierarchy), and moderating effects of
each culture type were tested separately.

To answer RQ4, I used structural equation modeling (SEM) (Kline, 2016; Tabachnick and
Fidell, 2013; Everitt and Hothorn, 2011). In the model, personality trait, organizational culture,
and political ideology were defined by a single indicator, and moral foundations were defined by
multiple indicators (Care and Fairness for Individualizing foundation; Loyalty, Authority, and
Purity for Binding foundation). Before fitting the model, I checked multivariate normality, which
is the assumption for the maximum likelihood estimation, the default estimation method in SEM.
I conducted Mardia’s test and found that the multivariate normality assumption was violated. To
address this issue, I utilized maximum likelihood estimation with robust standard errors and a
Satorra-Bentler scaled test statistic. To evaluate the model, I checked multiple fit indices together
– the model chi-square (𝜒 2 ), the comparative fit index (CFI), the Tucker-Lewis index (TLI), the
root-mean square error of approximation (RMSEA), and the standardized root mean square
residual (SRMR).
I utilized R 4.0.3 for all statistical analyses I conducted for this paper. Especially, for the
SEM analysis, I utilized the lavaan package (Rosseel, 2012). The statistical significance I reported
in this paper was evaluated at the level of p = .05, unless specially noted otherwise.

4.5 Results

RQ1: How are engineering professionals’ big five personality traits, moral foundations, and
political ideology associated with each other?
Table 4.2 shows the bivariate correlation matrix. In terms of the correlations between
personality traits and moral foundations, according to the results, Extraversion was positively

70
associated with endorsement of the Binding (r = 0.13, p < .01) foundation, but it was not associated
with endorsement of Individualizing foundation. Agreeableness was positively associated with
endorsement of both the Individualizing (r = 0.26, p < .001) and Binding (r = 0.14, p < .01)
foundations. Conscientiousness was positively associated with the Binding (r = 0.26, p < .001)
foundation, but it was not associated with the Individualizing foundation. Neuroticism was
negatively associated with the Binding (r = -0.14, p < .01) foundation, but it was not associated
with the Individualizing foundation. Openness was positively associated with the Individualizing
(r = 0.16, p < .001) foundation, but it was not associated with the Binding foundation.
In terms of the correlations between personality traits and political ideology, Extraversion,
Agreeableness, and Openness were not associated with political ideology. However,
Conscientiousness was positively associated with political conservatism (r = 0.18, p < .001) and
Neuroticism was negatively associated with political conservatism (r = -0.13, p < .01). As higher
scores on the political ideology scale correspond to political conservatism and lower scores on the
political ideology scale correspond to political liberalism, it can be also said that neuroticism is
positively associated with political liberalism.
Also, in terms of the correlations between moral foundations and political ideology, the
Individualizing foundation was negatively associated with political conservatism (r = -0.37, p
< .001) (it can be also said that that individualizing foundation was positively associated with
political liberalism), and the Binding foundation was positively associated with political
conservatism (r = .50, p < .001).

Table 4.2. Bivariate Correlation between Moral Foundations, Big Five Personality Traits, and
Political Ideology
Measure 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
1 Individualizing —
2 Binding .13 ** —
3 Extraversion .04 .17 *** —
4 Agreeableness .26 *** .14 ** .19 *** —
5 Conscientiousness -.02 .26 *** .20 *** .19 *** —
6 Neuroticism .08 -.14 ** -.26 *** -.44 *** -.37 *** —
7 Openness .16 *** -.06 .32 *** .17 *** .13 ** -.21 *** —
8 Political Ideology -.37 *** .50 *** .08 -.05 .18 *** -.13 ** -.04 —
Note: Correlation coefficients can be interpreted as representing an effect size. In general, correlation coefficients
of .10, .30, and .50 are thought to represent small, moderate, and large effect size respectively (Cohen 1988). Gignac
and Szodorai (2016) suggests .10, .20, and .30 as thresholds.
*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

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RQ2: How does organizational culture moderate the relationships between engineers’
personality traits and moral foundations?
According to the moderation analyses with the Clan and Adhocracy cultures, there was no
significant moderating effect of the Clan culture or the Adhocracy culture on the relationship
between Agreeableness and the Individualizing moral foundation, nor on the relationship between
Agreeableness and Binding moral foundation (see Table 4.3 and Table 4.4) at the p < .05 level.
But at the p < .10 level, Adhocracy culture had a significant moderating effect on the relationship
between Agreeableness and the Binding moral foundation (𝐵 = 0.01, p = .065).

Table 4.3. Results of Moderation Analysis with Clan Culture

Individualizing Binding
𝐵 SE 𝐵 SE
Intercept 16.52 *** 4.71 14.05 * 6.09
Agreeableness 0.11 0.13 -0.01 0.17
Clan -0.14 0.22 -0.19 0.28
Agreeableness×Clan 0.00 0.01 0.01 0.01
Years in Current Org. -0.02 0.02 0.07 * 0.03
R2 .073 .037
Adj. R2 .065 .029
*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Table 4.4. Results of Moderation Analysis with Adhocracy Culture

Individualizing Binding
𝐵 SE 𝐵 SE
Intercept 13.84 ** 4.44 18.77 ** 5.70
Agreeableness 0.19 0.12 -0.14 0.16
Adhocracy -0.01 0.22 -0.45 0.28
Agreeableness×Adhocracy 0.00 0.01 0.01 † 0.01
Years in Current Org. -0.02 0.02 0.07 * 0.03
2 .071 .041
R
Adj. R2 .064 .033
†p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

According to the moderation analysis with the Market culture, there was no significant
moderating effect of Market culture on the relationship between Agreeableness and the
Individualizing moral foundation at the p <.05 level, but a significant moderating effect was found
at the p <.10 level (𝐵 = 0.01, p = .081). There was also a significant moderating effect of Market
culture on the relationship between Agreeableness and Binding moral foundation (B = 0.02, p <.05)

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at the p <.05 level. Table 4.5 shows the results in more detail, and Figure 4.5(a) visualizes the
moderation effect of Market culture on the relationship between Agreeableness and Binding moral
foundation.

Table 4.5. Results of Moderation Analysis with Market Culture

Individualizing Binding
𝐵 SE 𝐵 SE
Intercept 5.09 4.99 21.99 *** 6.38
Agreeableness 0.44 ** 0.14 -0.29 0.18
Market 0.42 † 0.24 -0.57 † 0.30
Agreeableness×Market -0.01 † 0.01 0.02 * 0.01
Years in Current Org. -0.02 0.02 0.07 * 0.03
R2 .073 .064
Adj. R2 .066 .057
†p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

According to the moderation analysis with the Hierarchy culture, there was no significant
moderating effect of Hierarchy culture on the relationship between Agreeableness and the
Individualizing moral foundation at the p <.05 level. But there was a significant moderating effect
of Hierarchy culture on the relationship between Agreeableness and the Binding moral foundation
(B = 0.02, p <.05). Table 4.6 shows the results in more detail, and Figure 4.5-(b) visualizes the
moderation effect of Hierarchy culture on the relationship between Agreeableness and the Binding
moral foundation.

Table 4.6. Results of Moderation Analysis with Hierarchy Culture

Individualizing Binding
𝐵 SE 𝐵 SE
Intercept 12.24 * 5.76 22.28 ** 7.39
Agreeableness 0.25 0.16 -0.27 0.20
Hierarchy 0.06 0.28 -0.57 0.35
Agreeableness×Hierarchy -0.00 0.01 0.02 * 0.01
Years in Current Org. -0.02 0.02 0.07 * 0.03
R2 .069 .050
Adj. R2 .062 .043
*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

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 (a) (b)

Figure 4.5. A visual representation of how the effect of Agreeableness on the endorsement of the
Binding foundation is moderated by (a) Market culture and (b) Hierarchy culture. The black dots
signify lower (16th percentile), medium (50th percentile), and higher (84th percentile)
Agreeableness respectively. Low, medium, and high Market and Hierarchy cultures indicate
16th, 50th, and 84th percentile scores of Market and Hierarchy cultures respectively.

RQ3) How does organizational culture moderate the relationships between engineers’
personality traits and political ideology?
According to the moderation analyses, there was no significant moderating effect of Clan,
Adhocracy, and Hierarchy cultures on the relationship between Agreeableness and political
ideology at the p <.05 level, although the moderation effect of the Hierarchy culture was significant
at the p <.10 level (𝐵 = 0.01, p = .09). However, the moderation analysis with the Market culture
showed a significant moderating effect (𝐵 = 0.01, p <.01). Table 4.7 shows the results, and Figure
4.6 visualizes the moderation effect of the Market culture on the relationship between
Agreeableness and political ideology.

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 Table 4.7. Results of Moderation Analysis
Political Ideology Political Ideology
𝐵 SE 𝐵 SE
Intercept 5.05 * 2.28 Intercept 6.45 ** 2.14
Agreeableness -0.05 0.06 Agreeableness -0.08 0.06
Clan -0.04 0.11 Adhocracy -0.12 0.11
Agreeableness×Clan 0.00 0.00 Agreeableness×Adhocracy 0.00 0.00
Years in Current Org. 0.04 *** 0.01 Years in Current Org. 0.04 *** 0.01
R2 .030 R2 .032
Adj. R2 .022 Adj. R2 .024
Political Ideology Political Ideology
𝐵 SE 𝐵 SE
Intercept 10.18 *** 2.40 Intercept 8.51 ** 2.78
Agreeableness -0.20 ** 0.07 Agreeableness -0.14 † 0.08
Market -0.29 * 0.11 Hierarchy -0.21 0.13
Agreeableness×Market 0.01 ** 0.00 Agreeableness×Hierarchy 0.01 † 0.00
Years in Current Org. 0.04 *** 0.01 Years in Current Org. 0.04 *** 0.01
2 .047 2 .035
R R
2
Adj. R .040 Adj. R2 .028
Note: For political Ideology, higher score represents conservatism, and lower score represents liberalism.
†p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.

Figure 4.6. A visual representation of how Market culture moderates the effect of Agreeableness
on political ideology. The black dots signify lower (16th percentile), medium (50th percentile),
and higher (84th percentile) Agreeableness respectively. Low, medium, and high Market indicate
16th, 50th, and 84th percentile scores of Market culture respectively.

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RQ4) Does the hypothesized model of personality traits-moral foundations-political ideology in
organizational culture properly explain the observed data?
For the organizational culture, I focused on the Market culture among the four types of
organizational culture, because it was the culture type that showed significant interaction effects
in RQ2 and RQ3. The theorized model in Figure 2 with Market culture as the organizational culture
variable showed an acceptable fit with my data (𝜒 2 = 72.707, df = 20, p <.001, CFI = 0.959, TLI
= 0.920, RMSEA = 0.072, SRMR = 0.045). Although the chi-square for this model was significant
at the 𝛼 <.05 level, the chi-square is known to be very sensitive to sample size - larger sample
inflates the chi-square values, so researchers usually do not conclude poor fit of their hypothesized
model with the results of the chi-square test alone (Kline, 2016; Schumacker & Lomax, 2004).
While the hypothesized model showed an acceptable fit already, several paths in the model
were not statistically significant. Specifically, the direct path between Agreeableness and political
ideology, Market culture and political ideology, and the interaction term and the political ideology
were not significant. Also, consistent with the results from the RQ2, the path between Interaction
term and Individualizing foundation was not significant, as well as the direct path between Market
culture and the Individualizing foundation, and years in current organization and the
Individualizing foundation. Therefore, I deleted those paths from the model for a parsimonious
model. The modified model did not change the model fit much (𝜒 2 = 82.666, df = 27, p <.001, CFI
= 0.956, TLI = 0.937, RMSEA = 0.064, SRMR = 0.046), while still suggests acceptable model fit.
Since the modified model is much simpler, I decided to report it as the final model. Figure 7 shows
the final model with the standardized coefficients.

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 Figure 4.7. Results from the structural equation modeling. For clarity of the presentation, the
residual variance terms are not displayed in the graphic. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001. The
paths between Binding and Loyalty and between Individualizing and Care were fixed to 1 before
standardizing the coefficients, so they are indicated as dotted lines without stars.

The model demonstrates that Agreeableness significantly predicts higher Individualizing

foundation (p <.001) and Individualizing foundation negatively predicts political conservatism (p
<.001). While there was no direct effect of Agreeableness on the Binding foundation, the
relationship between Agreeableness and the Binding foundation was moderated by Market culture
(p <.01), and Binding foundation positively predicted political conservatism (p <.001).

4.6 Discussion

For RQ1, my results showed that Conscientiousness was positively associated with
political conservatism, and this association is consistent with existing literature (Carney et al., 2008;
Sibley et al., 2012; Gerber et al., 2010; Gerber et al., 2011; Kireger et al., 2019; Vecchione et al.,
2011). However, contrary to existing literature, Openness was not associated with political
ideology in my sample of engineers. This finding was an unexpected result. Since the Cronbach’s
alpha from my data for the Openness items was 0.79, which suggests a good level of internal
consistency, I can argue the Openness items in the Big Five personality measure are likely reliable.

77
 Although I cannot determine the reason for this finding, one possible explanation could be
that engineers might interpret the Openness items differently from the general populations
represented in other studies, and these different interpretations might in turn change the variable’s
relationships with other variables. For example, an item for Openness is “I see myself as someone
who is original, comes up with new ideas.” Engineers might interpret these items differently
because engineering practice focuses on problem-solving (Sheppard et al., 2006). However, as I
will discuss again below, my data successfully replicated the positive association between
Openness and Individualizing foundation, and the association aligns with existing literature.
Therefore, the insignificant association between Openness and political ideology could also just
be an accidental result. In future research, it would be helpful to examine whether the Openness
items are answered differently by certain professional groups, especially by different groups of
engineers.
I found significant correlations between personality traits and moral foundations. These
results are consistent with existing literature (Lewis and Bates, 2011; Hirsh et al., 2010; Graham
et al., 2013). Moreover, as I expected, the Agreeableness personality trait was positively associated
with both the Individualizing and Binding foundations. This association aligns with the argument
that Agreeableness is a personality trait that is closely related to one’s morality (Walker, 1999).
However, to reiterate, Agreeableness was not associated with political ideology in my data, aligned
with what I also expected. Considering both results, I thought that a potential reason why
Agreeableness was not associated with political ideology can be that people with high
Agreeableness have the potential to be either conservative (note that high Agreeableness was
related to high Binding foundation) or liberal (note that high Agreeableness was related to
Individualizing foundation, too) in political ideology.
The findings for the relationships between moral foundations and political ideology further
supports this idea. The results showed that the Individualizing foundation was negatively
associated with political conservatism and Binding foundation was positively associated with
political conservatism. This finding again agrees with findings from the existing literature (Graham
et al., 2009).
For RQ2, the results showed that while the Clan and Adhocracy cultures did not moderate
the relationship between Agreeableness and moral foundations (Individualizing and Binding,
respectively), the Market culture and the Hierarchy culture moderated the relationship between

78
Agreeableness and the Binding foundation. As Figure 5 shows, the difference in the endorsement
of Binding foundation, when the Agreeableness personality trait is examined separately for low,
medium, and high levels of Agreeableness, became larger as the Market culture and Hierarchy
culture scores became higher. One possible interpretation can be that the level of Market culture
and Hierarchy culture had stronger impacts on one’s endorsement of the Binding foundation when
the Agreeableness personality trait is more pronounced.
For RQ3, the results showed that while the Clan, Adhocracy, and Hierarchy cultures did
not moderate the relationship between Agreeableness and political ideology, the Market culture
had a moderation effect. Interestingly, the Market culture seemed to change the direction of the
relationship between Agreeableness and political ideology. As Figure 6 shows, in low Market
culture contexts, engineers with high Agreeableness were more politically liberal than engineers
with low Agreeableness. However, in high Market culture settings, engineers with high
Agreeableness were more politically conservative than engineers with low Agreeableness.
While follow-up studies are needed to examine the reasons for this finding, one possible
explanation could be found from the inherent nature of the Agreeableness personality trait, which
“contrasts a prosocial and communal orientation toward others with antagonism and includes traits
such as altruism, tender-mindedness, trust, and modesty” (John et al., 2008, p. 120). As discussed,
the prosocial nature of the trait makes it closely related to one’s morals (Walker, 1999). However,
what is moral or ethical is often decided by social consensus. It is possible that people with high
Agreeableness may react more sensitively to their surrounding environment, including the culture
of their organizations. However, since I cannot reach definite conclusions with the data, follow-up
studies need to test this possibility.
In RQ4, the results showed that the impact of personality trait on the political ideology of
engineers is mediated by their moral foundations (Individualizing and Binding), while the
relationship between personality trait and moral foundation is moderated by organizational culture.
When I tested the direct and indirect effect of the Agreeableness personality trait on the political
ideology together in the same model, the direct effect was insignificant, so I removed those paths
for the final model. This finding suggests that even for engineers, the impact of the Agreeableness
personality trait on political ideology is exerted via moral foundations: This finding and
interpretation align with the arguments from the existing literature which investigated the
relationships with general population (Lewis and Bates, 2011; Caprara et al., 2006).

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 Yet unlike previous studies, my model includes organizational culture as a variable.
Although I found that Market culture significantly moderated the relationship between
Agreeableness and political ideology in RQ3, the moderation effect was not significant in the
structural equation model in RQ4. One possible explanation could be found from the fact that the
impact of Agreeableness on political ideology is mostly exerted via the Individualizing and
Binding foundations. It is possible that the moderation effect of the organizational culture is
exerted primarily on the impact of the personality trait on moral foundations, but when the moral
foundation is not considered, the organizational culture’s moderation effect appears on the direct
impact of personality trait on political ideology.

4.7 Implications

Although the rewards and career structures of professions differ from other occupations
(Spence et al., 2017; Li et al., 2002), the results showed that the associations between engineers’
personality traits, moral foundations, and political ideology were well aligned with the results from
other studies with more general populations. While there have been perspectives that perceive
professions as homogeneous and conservative (Goldthorpe, 1982), each individual professional
has a unique personality which is associated with their moral foundations and political ideology.
An interesting follow-up question can be whether a profession’s personality profile is different
from that of general population and other professions, so that their political and moral perspectives
are also different reflecting the difference. If there is no difference in personality profiles while
there still is a difference in political and moral perspectives between the profession and general
population, what other characteristics shape the difference can also be an important question.
In terms of the organizational culture, the impact of the Market culture was noteworthy. In
a higher Market culture, people with high Agreeableness personality traits tended to endorse the
Binding foundation and were aligned with conservative political ideology more than in a lower
Market culture. What this finding implies is that individuals are neither passively impacted by the
culture nor equally impacted by the culture. Rather, as individuals interact with the culture, the
outcomes (moral foundations and political ideology) can be different even in the same environment.
Also, this finding may also imply that Market culture favors people with certain moral and political
perspectives – people who more strongly endorse the Binding foundation, and those who are more
politically conservative.

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 While there were sectors with higher or lower Market cultures, the engineering profession
is well-known to work in private business settings, which showed reasonably high Market culture
scores in my data (see Appendix A; as a note, the sector that showed significantly lower Market
culture score was government, which is not a private sector). I expect this finding can provide
especially interesting insights on future studies regarding the politics and morality of professions
like engineers and accountants, many of whom work in private sector settings. If the Market culture
indeed favors people who more strongly endorse the Binding foundation and those who are more
conservative, at least in private sector settings, the professionals with politically conservative
orientations may significantly shape the collective social responsibilities of the profession.

4.8 Limitations and Future Work

In another paper complementary to the work described here [Chapter 3], I described a few
limitations in the sample and the political ideology measure. For example, the majority of my
survey participants were LinkedIn users, and this fact could bias the results. Also, since
participation in the surveys was completely voluntary, the survey respondents were self-selected.
Therefore, it would be helpful to check if the findings from this study can be replicated in follow-
up studies. Moreover, while there has been reasonable validity evidence for the political ideology
measure and I used it for simplicity and compatibility with existing studies, it is not a sophisticated
measure. For deeper understanding of political ideologies of professionals, follow-up studies with
more sophisticated measures could be helpful.
A limitation that only belongs to this paper lies in another measure that I used in this paper
– the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument. While the OCAI and the measure’s
underlying theoretical framework provide a useful tool for conceptualizing and evaluating the
culture of organizations, critics of the measure have suggested that the OCAI’s culture types have
a narrow focus and cannot broadly capture cultural differences (Scott et al, 2003). While I
acknowledge that culture cannot be fully captured by a measure, including the OCAI, I believe
this study can provide a starting point of further investigations of the interaction between
organizational culture and practice of engineers. Follow-up qualitative studies can also be
conducted for a deeper understanding of cultural influences on engineers’ moral and political
perspectives.

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 Also, this study has a broad scope and utilizes many variables including five personality
traits, two groups of moral foundations (Individualizing and Binding), political ideology, and four
organizational culture types. I narrowed down the scope of this study to focus on Agreeableness
and Market culture based on existing literature, but there are many remaining opportunities to
explore other personality traits and organizational culture variables. I encourage researchers to
conduct follow-up research studies based on the findings reported here.

4.9 Conclusion

In this paper, I answered four research questions related to the relationships between
engineering professionals’ personality traits, moral foundations, and political ideology, and the
impact of their workplace organizational cultures. The results regarding the relationships among
the variables were generally consistent with the existing literature, with a few exceptions. Among
the organizational culture types, the Market and Hierarchy cultures showed significant moderating
effects on the relationship between the Agreeableness personality trait and the Binding moral
foundation. Market culture also showed a significant moderating effect on the relationship between
Agreeableness and political ideology. Lastly, I confirmed that the impact of engineers’
Agreeableness personality trait on political ideology is mediated by their moral foundations. I
further discussed that the results from this study may imply that Market culture favors people who
more strongly endorse the Binding foundation and those who are more politically conservative,
and this suggests that those with politically conservative orientations may significantly shape the
collective social responsibilities of the engineering profession. This interpretation may also have
significant implications for those who would like to reimagine the responsibilities that engineers
have toward society.

4.10 Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the Dale and Suzi Gallagher Professorship in
Engineering Education at Purdue University. This material is also based upon work supported by
the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2024301.

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 MORAL NARRATIVES OF PRACTICING ENGINEERS

5.1 Introduction

Moral narratives are the stories that support and sustain one’s moral life (McAdams, 2009).
I divide moral narratives into two types: personal moral narratives and archetypal moral narratives.
Personal moral narratives are individuals’ unique stories related to their moral life. Archetypal
moral narratives are collective stories that represent the common themes across individuals’
personal moral narratives. Archetypal moral narratives in a society influence personal moral
narratives, and personal moral narratives collectively inform archetypal moral narratives, as well.
Engineers’ moral narratives reflect visions and images of good engineering practices, guide
engineers’ ethical decision-making, and could serve an educational role for engineering students.
To complement current pedagogical approaches, which typically use codes of ethics and
case studies, I plan to develop a new pedagogy through which students can construct their own
personal moral narrative that reflect values and virtues of engineers. To establish fundamental
knowledge for development of this new pedagogical approach, I am first investigating the moral
narratives of engineering practitioners. Especially, this paper reports an exploratory investigation
for understanding engineering practitioners’ personal moral narratives. I report four example moral
narratives I obtained as a part of the larger research project.

5.2 Literature Review

5.2.1 Moral narratives

McAdams and Pals (2006) conceptualized a three-level personality model consists of

dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and life narratives. Dispositional traits refer to
relatively stable individual traits like the elements in the Big Five personality model: Extraversion,
Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Openness, and Neuroticism (John et al., 1991). Characteristic
adaptations are a more malleable level of personality, such as one’s values and beliefs. Life
narratives are the stories that support and sustain one’s life, which play a central role in one’s
identity. McAdams and Pals suggested that these three levels of personality are interdependent and
situated in the culture surrounding the individual. Based on this conceptualization, McAdams

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(2009) defined the concept of moral personality. Moral personality means a particular element of
the three-level personality and characterizes one’s moral life. For example, moral narratives are
stories that “best support and sustain [one’s] moral life” (p. 23). As I briefly discussed, I divide
moral narratives into two types: personal moral narratives and archetypal moral narratives. In the
context of moral personality, moral narrative represents personal moral narratives.
Personal moral narratives are influenced by archetypal moral narratives in society, and the
examples of the archetypal moral narratives could be found in Randazzo and Haidt (2015). They
suggested that narratives influence individuals’ value judgments which often lead to their
conclusions on specific societal issues related to public policy. They illustrated their idea with the
example of economists: They introduced two distinct narratives about capitalism. Story 1:
capitalism is exploitation. Story 2: capitalism is liberation. They argued that U.S. economists think
of capitalism in line with one of the two stories, at least partially, and further explained that the
economists who perceive capitalism as exploitation are more likely to favor the welfare and
regulatory states, whereas the economists who perceive capitalism as liberation are more likely to
favor shrinking the welfare and regulatory states. In other words, economists’ public policy
opinions are consistent with their moral narratives. Here, the suggested two moral narratives of
economists (Story 1 and Story 2) are archetypal moral narratives. Although individual economists
would have unique personal moral narratives, those personal moral narratives could be linked to
one of the two stories about capitalism.
Other studies have examined narratives in the moral domain, although without explicit use
of the term “moral narratives”. To provide insights for the question “why people vary in their
visions of the good society?”, Haidt et al. (2009) introduced four ideological narratives: the
narrative of secular liberals, the narrative of libertarians, the narrative of religious left, and the
narrative of social conservatives. For example, the secular liberals’ narrative states that traditional
societies have deep-rooted inequality and exploitation. Thus, the narrative calls for aspiration to
“dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality, exploitation, and repression” (Haidt et al., 2009, p.
116). In contrast, the social conservatists’ narrative states that traditional American values
including fidelity, personal responsibility, and family have become undermined due to the political
movements of liberals. Therefore, their narrative concludes that Americans should “take their
country back from those who sought to undermine it” (Haidt et al., 2009, p. 117). Aligned with
the argument of Haidt et al. (2009), which says that ideological narratives are distinct from

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personal life stories in that an ideological narrative is shared by members of a group, I consider an
ideological narrative as an example of an archetypal moral narrative.
One of the functions of the archetypal moral narratives is educating people. Dehghani et
al. (2009) utilized the term “cultural narratives” and suggested religious texts and folk stories as
some examples. While arguing that those cultural narratives are “instrumental in teaching core
cultural moral values” (p. 1912), they showed that individuals’ decisions about moral dilemmas
are influenced by how the dilemmas are analogically accessible to core cultural narratives of the
society. For example, people are likely to select an action that is described as moral in the cultural
narrative, when a given dilemma is structurally similar to a cultural narrative of society. Therefore,
archetypal moral narratives have a potential to be used to educate people.
To sum, previous studies have examined archetypal moral narratives, which are shared by
many people in a society, reflect the visions of good society, guide one’s opinions on public policy,
and also serve an educational role in society. However, while the focus of previous studies have
been society at the national level, few studies have explored the moral narratives of specific groups
within the larger society, such as engineers.

5.2.2 Engineering and moral narratives

During World War Ⅱ, engineers became increasingly aware of the societal impact of their
engineering practice (Mitcham, 2009). After the war, professional societies including the National
Society of Professional Engineers and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers updated
their codes of ethics to emphasize the engineering profession’s responsibility towards public
health, safety, and welfare (Herkert, 2009). Often, engineering ethics courses introduce the stories
of engineers who exemplified such responsibility, to encourage students to be ethical engineers (in
my term, those stories are personal moral narratives of engineers). For example, Pritchard (1998)
introduced a few stories of exemplary practice among engineers and suggested that stories like
those should be introduced in engineering courses.
I expect that there are a few archetypal moral narratives of engineers, but to my knowledge,
no previous study has systematically investigated engineers’ archetypal moral narratives. I just
speculate that engineers’ archetypal moral narratives may have been constructed around the core
engineering values like public health, safety, and welfare. To identify archetypal moral narratives,
however, researchers need to identify various personal moral narratives first, as the archetypal

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moral narratives can be obtained through the synthesis of the personal moral narratives. Also, as
the concept moral narrative has not been studied much in the field of engineering ethics, it would
be helpful to introduce a few examples of personal moral narrative of engineers in this paper, for
researchers who are interested in this topic and for educators who are interested in utilizing moral
narratives for engineering ethics education.

5.3 Methodology

I utilize narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) with the elements of ethnographic
interviewing (Spradley, 2016) as the methodological approach. This study of moral narratives
follows the Chapters 3 and 4 of this dissertation, which investigated organizational cultures and
moral values across representative employment sectors of engineers through the surveys with 515
engineering practitioners. Based on the survey results, for this study, I conducted follow-up
interviews with 25 engineers across industry sectors and demographic attributes (e.g., age, gender).
Each interview lasted 90 to 120 minutes, and each participant were compensated with a $100
Amazon gift card.
The first half of the interview followed the ethnographic interview approach (Spradley,
2016) to investigate the organizational culture of the engineers’ workplaces. The second half of
the interview followed the narrative inquiry approach (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) to investigate
the moral narratives of the engineers. By coupling the ethnographic interview with the narrative
inquiry, I sought to learn how individuals’ moral narratives interact with the organizational culture
where they work. However, as the focus of this paper is introducing some examples of personal
moral narratives of engineers, I will not discuss much of the organizational cultural element in this
chapter. The following sections describe the methodology, the interview protocol, the participant
recruitment strategy, and the analysis procedure.

5.3.1 Narrative inquiry and ethnographic interviewing

Narrative inquiry is a qualitative research methodology with primary data source of in-
depth qualitative interviews of individuals. As McAdams (2006) describes, narrative methods
provide “tools and concepts for discerning the inner patterning and meaning of human lives” (p.
11) and have particular benefit when “examining the particularities of the single case” (p. 14).

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Narrative inquiry involves personal storytelling to investigate the lived stories of individuals
(Lichtman, 2013), in contrast with other research methodologies. Therefore, narrative is both the
method and the phenomenon under investigation simultaneously (Pinnegar & Daynes, 2007). As
this study aims for obtaining some examples of practicing engineers’ moral narratives, I chose
narrative inquiry as a primary research methodology.
While the narrative inquiry is the primary methodology, I also adapted some techniques of
ethnographic interviewing to understand the context of each engineer’s day-to-day work and their
organizational culture, which could impact their understanding and practice of engineering ethics.
An ethnographic study produces a systematic description of a culture, which is developed through
the researcher’s extensive immersion in the culture (Lichtman, 2013). While I did not conduct a
full ethnography to examine a particular culture, I utilized the ethnographic interview technique to
obtain information about each participant’s perceptions of the culture of their organization.
Spradley (2016) introduced three main types of ethnographic questions: descriptive questions,
structural questions, and contrast questions. Descriptive questions enable researchers to collect the
informants’ own language and understand significant features of the cultural scene. Structural
questions enable researchers to discover the basic units in the informants’ cultural knowledge.
Contrast questions enable researchers to discover meaning making among informants as they
distinguish events and objects in their world.
While researchers ask all three types of questions during the interviews for a full
ethnographic study, during my interviews I only asked descriptive questions because the goal was
not conducting a full ethnographic study. I asked descriptive questions because that question type
was especially effective to elicit participants’ general perceptions on their daily work and on their
organizational culture to better understand the remaining parts of the interview. In case those could
be helpful, I also included the other two types of questions in the protocol, but I ended up not
utilizing them.

5.3.2 Interview protocol

The interview protocol consisted of three main sections. After a quick background section
(Section 1: Background), I asked questions related to the organizational culture of the participants’
workplace (Section 2: Organizational culture), following the ethnographic interview approach
(Spradley, 2016). Later I asked questions designed to explore participants’ stories centered on their

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moral values as an engineer (Section 3: Moral narrative), following the narrative inquiry
(Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) approach. The structure of the interview protocol and some example
questions are as follows (the full interview protocol is in Appendix D):
Section 1: Background
• Participant’s 30-second elevator speech
• Pathway towards current organization and job role
Section 2: Organizational culture
• One of the descriptive questions
o Think of a typical day in your company. Could you start at the beginning of
a day and describe what goes on? (What do you do when you first arrive
your workplace, and what do you do next?)
• One of the survey follow-up questions
o You indicated your organization’s dominant characteristic is [interviewee’s
survey answer]. Could you explain more about that?
Section 3: Moral narrative
• Moral narratives
o As an engineer, what are the important values for you? Throughout your
engineering career, how have you developed such values?
• Link to the organizational culture
o How are the important values in your organization related to the stories and
the values you pointed out? What effort does your organization make to
foster such values?

5.3.3 Participant recruitment and demographics

I interviewed 25 participants. The interview participants were purposefully selected from

the participants of the previous survey study [Chapters 3 and 4]. In the previous study, 515
practicing engineers had completed a survey that had included items from the Big Five Personality
Inventory (John et al., 1991), Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham et al., 2009), and
Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (Cameron & Quinn, 2011). Engineers working in
various sectors including automotive, computer/electronics/IT, construction, healthcare, oil and

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gas/mining, and government participated in the survey. At the end of the survey, I had asked
whether they would be interested in participating in a follow-up interview. I contacted only
participants who agreed to be contacted for the follow-up interview.
I interviewed a few purposefully selected individuals from sectors that differed in the
dominant moral values and political perspectives, as well as in the dominant organizational
cultures perceived by engineers in those sectors. For example, according to the results in the
Chapter 3, in terms of the moral values and political perspectives of its members, the
computer/electronics/IT sector differed significantly from the manufacturing sector (including
automotive and oil & gas). Also, the organizational culture in government differed greatly from
the organizational culture in the computer and electronics industry. Eventually, I invited engineers
from five employment sectors: automotive, computer/electronics/IT, government, healthcare, and
oil & gas.
I aimed at interviewing five individuals per sector, but I ended up interviewing fewer
engineers from the government sector (total of three) and more engineers from the
computer/electronics/IT sector (total of seven) reflecting the number of original survey
participants. Additionally, When I invited interview participants, I tried to ensure diversity in
demographic variables (e.g., gender, race). As a result, among the participants, seventeen of them
were male and eight of them were female. Also, sixteen of them identified themselves as a White,
while six as an Asian, two as a mixed-race, and one as a Hispanic. Table 1 shows the demographic
information of the four interview participants whose narratives are introduced in this paper.
Initially I randomly assigned a pseudonym to each individual to anonymize the data, but the
participants had a chance to change their pseudonym in case they had a preference.

Table 5.1. Demographic Information of the Interviewees of the Four Narratives Introduced in
this Paper

Pseudonym Sector Gender Race Age

Margaret Automotive Female White 53
Olivia Government Female Asian 33
Sophia Healthcare Female White 26
Graham Oil & Gas Male White 65

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5.3.4 Data analysis

To become familiar with the data, I listened to the audio-recording of the interviews and
cleaned the data by myself. After data cleaning, I read through each interview transcript multiple
times and rearranged the interviewees’ experiences into chronological order. These experiences
included education, the job search process, and events both inside and outside their workplaces.
Then I utilized the interviewees’ own voices to illustrate the events and constructed each
individual’s moral narrative. I targeted each narrative to be about 1000-word in length, although
the actual length of the narrative slightly varied across the narratives. To enhance trustworthiness
of the results, when I constructed the narratives, I utilized direct quotes from the transcripts with
the participants’ own expressions and word choices (Kellam et al., 2015). While a few
additions/deletions or adjustment of the sentences were inevitable to enhance readability of the
narratives, such changes were mostly very minor.
I acknowledge that my positionality as an engineering education researcher with limited
engineering practice experience might have influenced the interpretation of the data. For example,
most interviewees had had extensive work experience, so the stories were interpreted and the
narratives were constructed from an outsider’s perspective. Also, I am a female international
scholar from South Korea, and I have lived in the U.S. since 2017. As none of my interviewees
shared the same national background, the values and life stories that the interviewees shared could
be interpreted from a foreigner’s perspective. However, to make sure the results are trustworthy,
after the analysis, I asked each interviewee to examine their own narrative, and I incorporated their
feedback into the final narrative.

5.4 Results

Each interviewee had unique narratives which reflect their own life history – from
childhood upbringing to school experiences, religious activities, motivation to study engineering,
family, incidents at their workplace, and critical life events. While there could be many different
ways to introduce those narratives, in this paper, I will focus on introducing the narratives of two
early career engineers (Sophia and Olivia), which showed contrasting approaches to their moral
life and engineering work, as well as the narratives of two senior engineers (Margaret and Graham),
who integrated their critical life and work experiences into their approaches as an engineer. I

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decided to introduce narratives of both early career engineers and senior engineers to provide
example narratives of engineers who are in both early and later stages of the moral formation
process. Within the pool of early career and senior engineers, I selected narratives that showed
contrasting stories. Full narratives of those four engineers are included in Appendix E. While I
constructed first-person narratives for each engineer, in the following part of this results section, I
will introduce each narrative with my voice (as a third-person) to provide my interpretation and
highlight the major points of each narrative to compare across the four narratives.

Narrative 1: Sophia

Sophia earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering and master’s degree in health
informatics. Since the completion of her bachelor’s degree, she has been working at the same
pharmaceutical company for five and a half years. She decided intentionally to major in biomedical
engineering and to work in the health products industry because she aspired to make an impact.
Sophia believes “it’s so important to understand that the world is not always the nicest place and
it’s important to have people that are pushing positive insights forward.” She hopes that “when it’s
my time to go that I’m happy and proud of the achievements that I’ve done, and I try to live my
life with those values rooted in who I am every day.” For her, doing “the absolute best for everyone”
is important. She explains her pathway toward engineering and the health products industry as
follows:

When I was in high school, I’ve always been very acquainted to math and science,
and I knew I wanted to be in an area where I could make a lot of impact. […] And
I felt that there are so many health challenges in the world. When I’m working on
any healthcare related type of activities, I feel that I’m really making an impact on
a broader portion of the world, so, for me healthcare just always seemed the right
place to be. But I wasn’t that interested in interfacing with patients directly and I
thought engineering helped me find that right balance between wanting to be in the
healthcare space without necessarily wanting to interface with patients directly.
As she had expected and hoped, she has been fulfilling her aspiration in her current
organization while working. She feels her organization’s emphasis and her own values are well
aligned. As she explains,

There are so many things that we do internally to push patients first and I love that.
I value that and that’s why I’ve stayed for the last five years. It’s very important
that we don’t just look at the work that we do. We have the end goal. How this is

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 going to change the lives of people is very important. That’s something that we
emphasize truly across the board and I’m so very appreciative of that. […] At the
end of the day, if we impact one person's life enough to make them happy that is so
incredibly important to me and, I know that we're doing that, on such a larger scale
as well, which really helps me just resonate with what I’m doing every day. To
drive lives, to improve for patients… that’s one thing I think with the patient focus
I just love that we do.
Her aspiration to make positive impacts has been fulfilled through her work as she says,
“Any singular product that you work on whether that's a drug, or a medical device, the amount of
people that will have an influence on in a positive one, is very substantial. I think I feel that.” As
a result, she is thriving in her organization while enjoying her work. As she notes:

Anytime I do work on something that has been successful, it's very… it's fun. When
something gets approved it's… you've worked so hard to put so much time and
energy into something and now you're getting to impact people at such a grand
scale. And I really like that aspect of my work.
Sophia’s narrative shows how her aspiration to make a positive impact has guided her
career choice and partially because of her choice, how she is thriving in her work currently by
integrating her personal values with her daily work and actualizing her aspiration. I will call
Sophia’s model as an integrated model. While this Sophia’s story can be a good model for
engineers to live a moral life, another model could be also found in Olivia’s story, which follows
below.

Narrative 2: Olivia

Olivia earned undergraduate and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering. After two and
a half years of postdoctoral research, she joined a national lab, where she has worked for about
two years. Olivia identifies herself as a member of the government sector. She sets a clear boundary
between her work and the other parts of her life and takes different approaches to each of them.

Olivia perceives the essence of her work as problem-solving and identifies herself as “task
oriented” person. She perceives her curiosity and interest in problem-solving as an integral part of
herself, almost like a “personality.” As a task-oriented person, when she does the task, there are
particular values that she especially cares about – objectivity and honesty. She says:

I care a lot about the solution and the truth and facts and all that, and I try to be very
objective. That's good for my job. As a scientist engineer, you have to be objective.

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 […] Also, I care a lot about honesty. When you're doing science, I think it's always
good to be honest. I think honesty, it's a very important thing, especially in science
and engineering. […] So what I mean by honesty is, for example, not cheating and
not making up data. Not anyone I know of, but I’ve heard that people make up false
data to get publication, you make false statements on purpose, so I think those are
obviously the wrong thing. Also, if you collaborate with someone, in there you kind
of have an agreement on something like you do this, I do this, and how we publish
about authorship and all that and if people kind of goes back on the deal, I also feel
that's not a very honest thing to do. If you promise that you'll get certain authorship
after you do certain work, but then after you did the work, they're like, “Oh, what
agreement? We never had that.” it's terrible. So that’s about my work, task-oriented
side of me.
Beyond the “task-oriented” side of herself, Olivia also says that there is also a “humanity side” of
her, which refers to her life outside of her work. She says:

I think all the things I do outside of work it's… equally, or sometimes more
important things than I do at work. […] I’m quite involved in a lot of church and
charities. […] There's like tons of charity work that we're doing, and some of them
I organized, some of them I just participate. You know, they include simple things
from like, before the school starts, there's school drive things, so you give away
free school supplies. And on Christmas, we give out like free gifts and set up like a
free shopping thing so families are in need, they can come and shop for the kids for
free. I also help with organizing outing events for cancer society, and I was also
doing fundraise for a lot of children impacted by AIDS in an Asian country. So
yeah, there's a lot of ways that we can do things like that.
According to her priority within different parts of her life (task-oriented side and humanity
side, according to her expression), engaging in church and charity works seem to be very important
for her. Olivia says, “So, for me personally, I would say they [my humanity side] are equally
important.” Although it is important, she does not expect her workplace to help her fulfill the
humanity side of her life. According to her, she is satisfied with her current job as she can find
good alignment between her task-oriented self and her organizational emphases. In Olivia’s words:

So, my workplace is very result-oriented and publicity oriented, and this aligns well
with my task-oriented side of me. I don't expect my workplace organization to cover
you know, charity work. I know they do have some charity work but on a smaller
scale, and I think that's also reasonable, because the goal of the lab is to… produce
results, not to do charity.
While Sophia integrates her aspiration to make a positive impact into her work, Olivia clearly
separates her work from her aspiration to engage in humanitarian activity. I would call Olivia’s
model a separated model of pursuing moral life.

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 Individuals’ moral narratives continuously evolve as one’s life continues, and as they
encounter new events and incidents. Compared with early-career engineers, senior engineers
tended to share more about how experiences during their careers impacted their moral lives. Those
experiences can be either incidents in their workplace or critical life events outside of their
workplace. The following Graham’s narrative shows the former case, and Margaret’s narrative
shows the latter case.

Narrative 3: Graham

Graham is a chemical engineer with an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering and

a master's degree in safety, security and emergency management. Since graduation, he has been
primarily in the chemicals/petrochemicals and refining industry. “In my 40 years, I’ve seen some
minor incidents and several large incidents primarily in my refining work. I've seen people do
stupid things that did not make sense that resulted in totally preventable accidents,” he says.
Among the accidents that he has encountered throughout his long career, he shares some of the
worst and most memorable ones:

The worst thing that's ever happened in my career happened at refinery A at Region
A. We had two people killed. We had two separate accidents, six months apart at
that refinery. In the first incident, the supervisor for that area of the refinery
overrode my PPE requirements, and people got hurt because they didn't have the
right PPE on. When the first one happened, I was a first responder for the accident.
I had never put a man in an ambulance before that I knew was going to die, as he
was burned over 95% of his body. That bothered me for a long time. In the second
incident, […] the glass rotameter blew out in the face of a colleague on the
emergency response team and he died right in front of the four of us trying to save
him. After the second incident, I actually went and got professional help. I was
having nightmares, I was seeing the people die all over again. If you ever have to
go through something like that, it's real trauma. I went through all that, the trauma
of all those two incidents, so I spent about six months with a therapist, one time a
week. I wrote letters to those I blamed about all the anger that I had about the
incident and gave them to the therapist. I left and changed jobs, and that was the
best thing I’ve ever did. I got a life in new place and was able to get peace of mind
again.
He continues and says, “The hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life was to go to the funeral
of the gentleman that died right front of me.” And it seems that this traumatic experience
significantly impacted Graham’s approach to his work, especially his attitudes and behaviors
towards how he guides his coworkers. In his words:

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 So I can talk about it now, and I can tell people, this is why you don't want to do
certain things. I talk about them and say I’ve seen things I don't ever want you to
see. I’ve been through things I don't ever want you to go through. And this is why
we tried to do this, this way or that way, to make things happen the right way. […]
I often tell people that if you do something, you may not be the person that gets
hurt but it may be the one standing next to you. I’ve seen enough of that over my
years; the person that does the wrong thing is not the one who gets hurt but rather
the person standing next to him.
He tries to actively intervene and influence the way the other people work, to make sure
the safety of the on-site workers by saying, “we want to do it the right way and we don't want you
to be the next person who would experience such a trauma.” He reveals his strong will to prevent
his coworkers from experiencing tragedies similar to what he experienced. He perceives that as
his responsibility and the core ethical element in his work:

In my current job, there are four plants that I have direct responsibility for and three
that I help when my counterpart is not available. Any one of those plants, can call
me 24/7 and say I need help. […] I am a regional health, safety, environmental
manager in my company. My goal is to make sure my people go home at night, the
same way as they came to work this morning.
Graham’s story exemplifies how an engineer’s moral narrative evolves through various
incidents in their career. While it is natural that engineers develop their understanding and
perspectives about their ethical responsibilities throughout their work experiences, I could also
find examples of engineers whose moral narratives have evolved through their critical life
experiences. Margaret’s story in the following section illustrates a representative example.

Narrative 4: Margaret

Margaret earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, and since her graduation,
she has been working in the automotive industry for over 30 years. “With a combination of good
luck and opportunity that I had, I was continually able to move up in the organization,” she says.
She is currently a vice president with responsibility for quality processes across her company.

When Margaret encounters a problem that she needs to solve, she first strives to understand
the causes of the problem. Based on the understanding, she considers what she and her coworkers
need to change in their processes or procedures. She says, “one of the things that’s important to
me is to be a good person,” and thinks that helping people resolve the problem they have is a way
to be a good person, as reflected in her words:

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 I’ve always been a person where if I’ve suffered through something that's very
frustrating, I want to give other people a heads up and let them... not have to deal
with the same thing. I don't want to hide my mistake, I want to figure out well what
information didn’t I have, why did I make this mistake, who didn’t I talk to. And
then I want to tell, I mean, it's just part of my DNA, to want to tell people to fix
those problems. And that's kind of the way I approached quality.
But it seems her way to be a good person by solving problems goes beyond the context of
the technical problem-solving that she does to fulfill her responsibility in quality. Especially, she
is very interested in mentoring women engineers and cultivating an engineering work environment
where both sides of a dual-income couple can thrive. She shares how she became interested in
those activities. “Historically, in engineering, there was always… an expectation that you would
be available outside of work hours and that if you wanted to move up the organization you would
work harder because there was always an expectation that there was someone involved to help you
take care of your childcare,” Margaret says and continues, “and, to be honest, that was the same
for me. Even though I was a woman, my husband was a stay-at-home dad. So, I made all the same
sacrifices and tradeoffs that the men made to get to the to move up through the organization. The
travel, the longer hours, because, especially, you know, the need to put in those extra hours or to
be visible or to do those things were a major part of being promoted within the company. And I
was able to do that, because my husband did all the staining things that were necessary.”

As a woman engineer who could climb the corporate ladder so high, she has a strong
perspective on the attitude that engineers need to have to be successful:

I don't know if I inherently knew or I learned early, but you do need to have a seat
at the table. One of the things that I did do was I would make an effort to sit at the
table and not sit at the back. I did make an effort to be included. You need to make
an effort to be included. There are some people that are automatically included,
such as people who are big, more assertive, and more aggressive… but some of the
men are not included either. So one of the things that I would say to my team, if
they say, “well, they never invite me to the meeting,” then I say, “Well, you need
to then think about your behavior they're not inviting you why, because for some
reason you're not value-added in that meeting. So what do you need to do to make
that they would never think to not invite you?” Right? So, for a while, you have to
push your way in. In my whole life I’ve just always pushed my way in.
While she believes it is a practical approach that she has proven its effectiveness throughout
her career and that one should take to be successful, she also shares her growing interest in
inclusivity and belonging. For this reason, she shares her company’s recent discussion about in-
group and out-group at work. “It was interesting,” she says, “because now that I’m divorced, I’m

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kind of in an out-group. So most everybody at work is married, and there used to be a… kind of...
an understanding that you would be married because that showed that you are responsible. Right?
If you were married and had a family, you are ready to move up the ladder, because that was
showing a level of responsibility.” It seems her critical life experience, divorce, becomes an
opportunity for her to reflect on the issue of belonging from a different perspective.

“With that in mind,” she continues, “the key moment for me to become interested in the
topic is being part of my church.” She explains that currently, her church is discussing whether
gay marriages can be allowed and whether there can be gay clergy. She says, “that was when I
first realized that there may be people that did not feel they are included. Indeed, when I was going
through my divorce, my church really helped me. It was really comforting for me to go to church
and get communion through my divorce and through other things. That feeling of belonging, it
really hit me that… I was so sad that there were people that didn't that could have gone or interacted
with my church and didn’t feel the same way as me.”

It seems the discussion at church, combined with her critical life experience, provoked her
to think deeply about the issue of inclusivity and belonging in general and influenced her to
perceive it as a problem to solve. Her current interest well aligns with her company’s initiatives,
and she shares how fulfilling for her it is to engage in those activities to solve the problem.

So I think this is something that, all companies are currently struggling with: My
vision of equal rights first off was that, anybody could have whatever job that they
wanted. It could be a man or a woman, but now, the issue is how do you make it so
it's possible for two people to work and be fulfilled and not be working constantly.
I could not have done my job along the way, if we didn't have a stay-at-home parent
for my kids. So I think now what my company is trying to do is they're trying to
change those norms and actively trying to figure out how to mentor women. […]
So, in my company, there's an actual focus on, you know, “okay Margaret, let's
look at your organization, where are the women, where are the people of color,
what can we do to help them continue to move off, what kind of mentoring, what
kind of help?” So I think that makes me happier and more fulfilled. I feel, now like,
20% of my job is just doing the quality but it's making… almost being like an elder
statesman and making things better for people and trying to drive that inclusivity
through the organization.
It is noteworthy that Graham and Margaret showed similar motivation behind their
endeavor in their job, albeit the specific experience they had were completely different – both of
them went through a hard time, and they hope that the other people would not experience the same

97
pain. For Graham and Margaret, taking responsibility to reduce harms to or difficulties of others
is the key ethical consideration in their job.

5.5 Discussion

The four narratives I introduced in this paper suggest that although there has been a clear
conceptual distinction between engineering ethics and general morality (Davis, 2006), an
individual’s moral narratives as an engineer are closely intertwined with their life history as a
person. Engineers often bring their personal values into their work and realize their vision through
their engineering work. For example, Sophia has fulfilled her aspiration to make a positive impact
on society through her engineering work in the healthcare industry (of course, there were cases
like Olivia, who clearly separated her ethics at work from her ethics/morality outside of work).
Also, in developing their moral narrative as an engineer, engineers are also influenced by their
personal life events, as Margaret’s story illustrated (of course, there were cases like Graham, whose
narrative has been heavily influenced by his work experience).
The finding may emphasize an obvious fact again, that engineers are also humans who
have their own life history and who bring their own values and perspectives into their workplace.
Howland et al. (2022) highlighted that engineering students frequently reported family as an
influential factor in their ethical and moral formation. The findings from this study confirmed the
finding from Howland et al. (2022), because many engineers who participated my study reported
their upbringing and religious activities (which were often considered as a family activity) as
influential or often, foundational factors on their core values. This finding suggests that in teaching
engineering ethics, educators may consider connecting engineering ethics with engineers’ personal
lives. For example, when educators teach engineering code of ethics, they can discuss how it
compares with their own values, and reflecting on their personal history, how they can thrive on
their aspirational career pathway as an engineer with both engineering and personal values.
The finding naturally connects to the framework that I developed in Chapter 2. In Chapter
2, I suggested that throughout the process of professional socialization, novice engineers
internalize norms and values as an engineer. However, I argued that novice engineers already bring
their own values and perspectives when the professional socialization begins, so there are always
individual differences in the process and outcomes of the socialization (Kim, 2022). I would argue
that the results of this paper support the idea. For example, Sophia was a student who wanted to

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make a positive impact on society before she started her engineering degree, and her personal value
was reinforced by the organizational culture that values patient safety, which is an important
professional value of biomedical engineers.

5.6 Conclusions

In this paper, I reported an exploratory investigation to identify some examples of moral

narratives of engineering practitioners. I introduced the narratives of two early-career engineers
and two senior engineers. The results showed that an individual’s moral narratives as an engineer
are intertwined with their life history as a person, although there are some different approaches in
pursuing a moral life (integrated model vs. separated model). In formation of moral narratives,
engineers are influenced by both incidents at their own workplace and critical life events. The
results were well aligned with the professional socialization framework that I developed in Chapter
2.

5.7 Acknowledgments

This work was supported in part by the Dale and Suzi Gallagher Professorship in
Engineering Education at Purdue University. This material is also based upon work supported by
the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2024301. The preliminary version of this work
was published in the 2021 Frontiers in Education Conference proceedings (Kim, D., Jesiek, B. K.,
Loui, M. C. (2021a). Moral narratives of practicing engineers across industry sectors for
engineering ethics education. Proceedings of the 2021 Frontiers in Education Conference. DOI:
10.1109/FIE49875.2021.9637275. © 2021 IEEE).

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 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK

6.1 Conclusions

In this dissertation, I presented four independent but related studies to examine engineering
practitioners’ professional socialization, especially focusing on the dimension of moral formation.
In Chapter 2, I created a theoretical framework for professional socialization, which
includes moral formation, by synthesizing the ideas of Durkheim, Kohlberg, Hoffman, and Haidt,
with Durkheim as a common thread. I argued that professional socialization is a process of
individuals’ entrance into the group of professionals, including understanding the group and
shaping affective and behavioral responses towards it. Through the socialization process,
individuals learn the expected behaviors in the group and decide what kind of person they will be
and how they will perform in the group, reflecting their personality, values, and purposes. Also, I
argued that moral formation is the process of integrating the social norms and values into
individuals’ own motive systems, and the moral formation process is influenced by social
discipline, a collective process of using cultural influences to facilitate the moral formation of the
members of the social group. I highlighted that for moral formation of engineers, culture of the
engineers’ workplaces would be also very important because the contents of social discipline come
from culture, a dynamic and evolving entity that reflects the members of the society’s intervention.
I postulated that moral personality is formed throughout the moral formation process and
focused on different levels of moral personality in the following empirical studies. In Chapter 3, I
focused on the characteristic adaptation level of moral personality (e.g., values, beliefs), more
specifically, political ideology and moral foundations of engineering practitioners. Based on
survey responses from 515 engineers, I examined how engineers’ political ideologies are
associated with their moral foundations and how engineers’ political ideologies and moral
foundations vary across their employment sectors, organizational positions, and demographic
attributes. I found that engineers in the manufacturing sector are more politically conservative than
engineers in the computer/electronics/IT sector. Additionally, engineers in higher positions in their
organizations are more politically conservative than engineers in lower positions, and female
engineers are more politically liberal than male engineers. I also found that engineers’ endorsement
of the five moral foundations differs by sector and demographic attributes. Moreover, engineers’

100
moral foundations substantially explain engineers’ political ideologies, consistent with previous
studies using the Moral Foundations Theory. I thought the comparison across different
employment sectors could be especially helpful for ethics researchers because the working
environment, which can be informed by the dominant thoughts and attitudes of the members of
the group, could potentially inform the contents of the social discipline.
In Chapter 4, I focused on the relationships between dispositional traits level and
characteristic adaptations level of moral personality. I answered four research questions related to
the relationships between engineering professionals’ personality traits, moral foundations, and
political ideology, and how these interact with their workplace organizational cultures, based on
survey data that I used for Chapter 3. The findings from the study highlighted the importance of
both organizational culture and traits of individual professionals in understanding the political and
moral dimensions of professional practice. I further discussed that the findings from this study may
imply that Market culture favors people who more strongly endorse the Binding moral foundation
and those who are more politically conservative. The knowledge generated through this study,
about the relationships and interactions across different levels of moral personality, could deepen
the understanding of individual differences in the moral formation process, which I argued in
Chapter 2.
In Chapter 5, I focused on the narrative level of moral personality. I reported an exploratory
investigation to identify some examples of moral narratives of engineering practitioners and their
research and educational implications. Based on the narrative analysis results, I introduced four of
the narratives as examples: The narratives of two early-career engineers and two senior engineers.
The results showed that an individual’s moral narrative as an engineer is intertwined with their life
history as a person, although there are some different approaches in pursuing a moral life
(integrated model vs. separated model). In formation of moral narratives, engineers are influenced
by both incidents at their own workplace and critical life events. I argued that the results were well
aligned with the professional socialization framework that I developed in Chapter 2.
As this dissertation study has to have multiple focuses with numerous variables, engineers’
moral formation is a very complex and multifaceted process. This dissertation provided a few
facets of fundamental knowledge that complement each other to help researchers better understand
the moral formation of engineers. For example, while Chapter 3 showed differences in dominant
political ideologies across engineering workplaces, Chapter 4 showed how highly agreeable

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engineers can be potentially influenced by the culture of their workplaces (e.g., high Market culture)
and shape their political perspectives. Chapter 5 took a step back and obtained narratives of
engineers that encompass such an interactive process of moral formation.
However, while I tried to capture a holistic picture of the process through these multi-level
theoretical and empirical studies, I could find more unresolved questions than resolved questions
as I study more. The following section describes the future work, which can be also linked to the
implications of my dissertation.

6.2 Future Work

I could identify several unresolved questions which could inform future studies. For
example, although I could find the differences in political ideologies across engineers’
employment sectors, current study could not explain the reason: why engineers from the
manufacturing sector tend to be more politically conservative than engineers from the
computer/electronics/IT sector is unknown. Also, it is not known why highly agreeable engineers
tend to be more politically conservative in high Market culture while they tend to be more
politically liberal in low Market culture. Future studies may answer those questions through further
investigations.
Moreover, future study can also involve identifying archetypal moral narratives of
engineering practitioners. As I explained in Chapter 5, I suggested there are two types of moral
narratives – personal moral narratives and archetypal moral narratives. As the archetypal moral
narratives can be identified through a synthesis of the personal moral narratives, the follow-up
study will include identifying a few archetypal moral narratives of engineering practitioners to
understand common themes across the personal moral narratives. Once the archetypal moral
narratives are identified, I expect those can be also used in engineering ethics classrooms.
As the interview also included questions related to the participants’ perceptions of their
organizational culture, I will also analyze the data and explore the influence of the organizational
cultures on individuals’ personal moral narratives. The additional 21 personal moral narratives that
I did not include in this paper will also be published as separate journal papers, according to their
themes. Follow-up studies can be designed for the theoretical study (Chapter 2) too. As I suggested
that social discipline facilitates engineers’ moral formation, future study may identify the
components and process of social discipline for engineers in reality through a qualitative study.

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 In the field of engineering education, one of the motivations behind conducting research
on engineering practice is to identify its educational implications. As my dissertation focused on
engineering practitioners, to identify educational implications it would be helpful to understand
how engineering practitioners and students are similar or different in terms of the variables I
studied. Therefore, future studies can also involve the comparison between engineering
practitioners and students in terms of their moral foundations and political ideologies. I already
collected students’ data with the same survey instrument for the comparison.
As more practice-oriented work for education, a new pedagogical approach can be
designed and tested based on the results of Chapter 5 about the moral narratives of engineers:
Scaffolded Ethics Autobiography (SEA), which I also briefly introduced in Chapter 2 and a
previous publication (Kim et al., 2021a). The SEA pedagogy aims to provide students with
opportunity to construct their own personal moral narrative as an engineer. The SEA pedagogy is
scaffolded because students will be able to refer to engineering practitioners’ moral narratives to
construct their own: As I have identified engineering practitioners’ personal moral narratives
through my dissertation study, I will give those narratives as examples that students can read and
reflect on.
First, students will read a selection of the personal moral narratives of engineers. Based on
their own interests, students can freely choose narratives of engineers that are aligned with their
career interests or values as aspiring professionals. Then students will answer the given reflection
questions (provided by their instructor(s)) like, “what values are emphasized in the narratives you
selected and how are those aligned with your own?” Reflecting their answers to those questions,
students will be asked to individually construct their own a personal moral narrative of about 1000
words. For example, students can read both Sophia’s and Olivia’s narratives and reflect on which
model of moral life they would pursue given their career pathways and goals.
While the SEA pedagogy can be a novel approach to teaching ethics to engineering
students, I cannot know the effectiveness of the pedagogy before testing it. Therefore, future work
can include testing the effectiveness of the SEA pedagogy in engineering students’ moral
formation.
These future studies, taken together, would add significantly to our knowledge about
engineering ethics in the workplace and about engineering ethics education.

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 APPENDIX A. SURVEY ITEMS

Big Five Personality Inventory (John et al., 1991)

Here are a number of characteristics that may or may not apply to you. For example, do you agree
that you are someone who likes to spend time with others? Please indicate the extent to which you
agree or disagree with each statement.
I see myself as someone who...
Strongly Disagree Neither Agree Strongly
disagree a little agree nor a little agree
disagree
Is talkative
o o o o o
Tends to find fault with others
o o o o o
Does a thorough job
o o o o o
Is depressed, blue
o o o o o
Is original, comes up with new ideas
o o o o o
Is reserved
o o o o o
Is helpful and unselfish with others
o o o o o
Can be somewhat careless
o o o o o
Is relaxed, handles stress well
o o o o o
Is curious about many different things
o o o o o
Is full of energy
o o o o o
Starts quarrels with others
o o o o o

104
Is a reliable worker
o o o o o
Can be tense
o o o o o
Is ingenious, a deep thinker
o o o o o
Generates a lot of enthusiasm
o o o o o
Has a forgiving nature
o o o o o
Tends to be disorganized
o o o o o
Worries a lot
o o o o o
Has an active imagination
o o o o o
Tends to be quiet
o o o o o
Is generally trusting
o o o o o
Tends to be lazy
o o o o o
Is emotionally stable, not easily upset
o o o o o
Is inventive
o o o o o
Has an assertive personality
o o o o o
Can be cold and aloof
o o o o o
Perseveres until the task is finished
o o o o o
Can be moody
o o o o o
Values artistic, aesthetic experiences
o o o o o

105
 Is sometimes shy, inhibited
o o o o o
Is considerate and kind to almost
everyone
o o o o o
Does things efficiently
o o o o o
Remains calm in tense situations
o o o o o
Prefers work that is routine
o o o o o
Is outgoing, sociable
o o o o o
Is sometimes rude to others
o o o o o
Makes plans and follows through with
them
o o o o o
Gets nervous easily
o o o o o
Likes to reflect, play with ideas
o o o o o
Has few artistic interests
o o o o o
Likes to cooperate with others
o o o o o
Is easily distracted
o o o o o
Is sophisticated in art, music, or
literature
o o o o o

Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham et al., 2009)

Moral Foundations, Part 1 of 2
When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following
considerations relevant to your thinking? "Not at all relevant" means this consideration has

106
nothing to do with your judgments of right and wrong. "Extremely relevant" means this is one of
the most important factors when you judge right and wrong.

Not at all Not very Slightly Somewhat Very Extremely

relevant relevant relevant relevant relevant relevant
Whether or not someone suffered
emotionally
o o o o o o
Whether or not some people were
treated differently than others
o o o o o o
Whether or not someone’s action
showed love for his or her
o o o o o o
country
Whether or not someone showed a
lack of respect for authority
o o o o o o
Whether or not someone violated
standards of purity and decency
o o o o o o
Whether or not someone was good
at math
o o o o o o
Whether or not someone cared for
someone weak or vulnerable
o o o o o o
Whether or not someone acted
unfairly
o o o o o o
Whether or not someone did
something to betray his or her
o o o o o o
group
Whether or not someone conformed
to the traditions of society
o o o o o o
Whether or not someone did
something disgusting
o o o o o o
Whether or not someone was cruel
o o o o o o
Whether or not someone was denied
his or her rights
o o o o o o
Whether or not someone showed a
lack of loyalty
o o o o o o

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 Whether or not an action caused
chaos or disorder
o o o o o o
Whether or not someone acted in a
way that God would approve of
o o o o o o
Moral Foundations, Part 2 of 2
Please read the following sentences and indicate your agreement or disagreement:
Strongly Moderately Slightly Slightly Moderately Strongly
disagree disagree disagree agree agree agree
Compassion for those who are
suffering is the most crucial
o o o o o o
virtue.
When the government makes laws,
the number one principle
o o o o o o
should be ensuring that
everyone is treated fairly.
I am proud of my country’s history.
o o o o o o
Respect for authority is something
all children need to learn.
o o o o o o
People should not do things that are
disgusting, even if no one is
o o o o o o
harmed.
It is better to do good than to do
bad.
o o o o o o
One of the worst things a person
could do is hurt a defenseless
o o o o o o
animal.
Justice is the most important
requirement for a society.
o o o o o o
People should be loyal to their
family members, even when
o o o o o o
they have done something
wrong.

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Men and women each have
different roles to play in
o o o o o o
society.
I would call some acts wrong on the
grounds that they are unnatural.
o o o o o o
It can never be right to kill a human
being.
o o o o o o
I think it’s morally wrong that rich
children inherit a lot of money
o o o o o o
while poor children inherit
nothing.
It is more important to be a team
player than to express oneself.
o o o o o o
If I were a soldier and disagreed
with my commanding officer’s
o o o o o o
orders, I would obey anyway
because that is my duty.
Chastity is an important and
valuable virtue.
o o o o o o

Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (Cameron & Quinn, 2011)

On this page there are six groups of statements, with four statements in each group. For each
statement, please indicate your agreement or disagreement, depending on: a) how much it
reflects the current organization you work for (if unemployed, the most recent organization you
worked for), and b) how much you would see each item in an ideal organizational context.

1. Dominant Characteristics
The organization is...
A. a very personal place. It is like an extended family. People seem to share a lot of themselves.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o

109
 Ideal
organization o o o o o
B. a very dynamic entrepreneurial place. People are willing to stick their necks out and take
risks.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
C. very results oriented. A major concern is with getting the job done. People are very
competitive and achievement oriented.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
D. a very controlled and structured place. Formal procedures generally govern what people do.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
2. Organizational Leadership
The leadership in the organization is generally considered to exemplify...
A. mentoring, facilitating, or nurturing.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree

110
 Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
B. entrepreneurship, innovating, or risk taking.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
C. a no-nonsense, aggressive, results-oriented focus.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
D. coordinating, organizing, or smooth-running efficiency.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
3. Management of Employees
The management style in the organization is characterized by...
A. teamwork, consensus, and participation.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o

111
B. individual risk-taking, innovation, freedom, and uniqueness.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
C. hard-driving competitiveness, high demands, and achievement.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
D. security of employment, conformity, predictability, and stability in relationships.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
4. Organization Glue
The glue that holds the organization together is...
A. loyalty and mutual trust. Commitment to this organization runs high.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
B. commitment to innovation and development. There is an emphasis on being on the cutting
edge.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree

112
 Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
C. the emphasis on achievement and goal accomplishment. Aggressiveness and winning are
common themes.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
D. formal rules and policies. Maintaining a smooth-running organization is important.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
5. Strategic Emphasis
The organization emphasizes...
A. human development. High trust, openness, and participation persist.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
B. acquiring new resources and creating new challenges. Trying new things and prospecting for
opportunities are valued.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
113
 Ideal
organization o o o o o
C. competitive actions and achievement. Hitting stretch targets and winning in the marketplace
are dominant.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
D. permanence and stability. Efficiency, control and smooth operations are important.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
6. Criteria of Success
The organization defines success on the basis of...
A. the development of human resources, teamwork, employee commitment, and concern for
people.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
B. having the most unique or newest products. It is a product leader and innovator.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
114
C. winning in the marketplace and outpacing the competition. Competitive market leadership is
key.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
D. efficiency. Dependable delivery, smooth scheduling and low-cost production are critical.
Strongly Disagree a little Neither agree Agree a little Strongly agree
disagree nor disagree
Current
organization o o o o o
Ideal
organization o o o o o
How long have you been in your current organization that you evaluated above? Please move the
slider to answer this question. (If unemployed, how long had you been in the most recent
organization you worked for?)
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50

Years

Demographic Information
Your age?
_______ years

Your gender identity?

o Male

o Female

o Other preferred description: ________________________________________________

115
 o Prefer not to answer

Your racial or ethnic identity? (select all that apply)

▢ American Indian or Alaska Native

▢ Asian or Asian American

▢ Black or African American

▢ Hispanic or Latino/a

▢ Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander

▢ White/Caucasian

▢ Other: _____________________________

▢ Prefer not to answer

Where did you complete the majority of your pre-college education?

o In the U.S.

o Outside of the U.S. (please specify where): ________________________________________________

Where did you complete your undergraduate education?

o In the U.S.

o Outside of the U.S. (please specify where): ________________________________________________

How would you describe your political orientation?

o Strongly liberal

o Moderately liberal

o Slightly liberal

116
 o Moderate (Neutral)

o Slightly conservative

o Moderately conservative

o Strongly conservative

o Other: _____________

Do you have a bachelor's degree in engineering?

o Yes

o No, I have a non-engineering bachelor's degree

Display This Question:

If Do you have a bachelor's degree in engineering? = Yes

What is your engineering bachelor's degree major?

▢ Aeronautical and/or Astronautical Engineering

▢ Agricultural and/or Biological Engineering

▢ Biomedical Engineering

▢ Chemical Engineering

▢ Civil Engineering

▢ Computer Engineering

▢ Computer Science

▢ Construction Engineering

▢ Electrical Engineering

117
 ▢ Engineering Education

▢ Engineering Management

▢ Environmental and/or Ecological Engineering

▢ Industrial and/or Systems Engineering

▢ Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Engineering

▢ Materials Engineering

▢ Mechanical Engineering

▢ Mining Engineering

▢ Nuclear Engineering

▢ Systems Engineering

▢ Other: __________________________________________

Display This Question:

If Do you have a bachelor's degree in engineering? = No, I have a non-engineering bachelor's degree

What is the major or field of your bachelor's degree?

________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________

Do you have a master's degree in engineering?

o Yes

o No, I have a non-engineering master's degree

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 o No, I do not have a master's degree

Display This Question:

If Do you have a master's degree in engineering? = Yes

What is your engineering master's degree major?

▢ Aeronautical and/or Astronautical Engineering

▢ Agricultural and/or Biological Engineering

▢ Biomedical Engineering

▢ Chemical Engineering

▢ Civil Engineering

▢ Computer Engineering

▢ Computer Science

▢ Construction Engineering

▢ Electrical Engineering

▢ Engineering Education

▢ Engineering Management

▢ Environmental and/or Ecological Engineering

▢ Industrial and/or Systems Engineering

▢ Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Engineering

▢ Materials Engineering

119
 ▢ Mechanical Engineering

▢ Mining Engineering

▢ Nuclear Engineering

▢ Systems Engineering

▢ Other: ___________________________________________

Display This Question:

If Do you have a master's degree in engineering? = No, I have a non-engineering master's degree

What is the major or field of your master's degree?

________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________

Do you have any other professional degree?

o Yes, I have an MD

o Yes, I have a JD

o Yes, other professional degree (please specify):

________________________________________________

o No

Do you hold a research-based doctorate degree (PhD) in engineering?

o Yes

o No, I have a non-engineering research-based doctorate degree

o No, I do not have a research-based doctorate degree

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Display This Question:
If Do you hold a research-based doctorate degree (PhD) in engineering? = Yes

What is your engineering doctorate degree major?

▢ Aeronautical and/or Astronautical Engineering

▢ Agricultural and/or Biological Engineering

▢ Biomedical Engineering

▢ Chemical Engineering

▢ Civil Engineering

▢ Computer Engineering

▢ Computer Science

▢ Construction Engineering

▢ Electrical Engineering

▢ Engineering Education

▢ Engineering Management

▢ Environmental and/or Ecological Engineering

▢ Industrial and/or Systems Engineering

▢ Interdisciplinary/Multidisciplinary Engineering

▢ Materials Engineering

▢ Mechanical Engineering

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 ▢ Mining Engineering

▢ Nuclear Engineering

▢ Systems Engineering

▢ Other: ___________________________________________

Display This Question:

If Do you hold a research-based doctorate degree (PhD) in engineering? = No, I have a non-engineering research-
based doctorate degree

What is the major or field of your doctorate degree?

________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________

In what year did you complete your most recent degree?

________________________________________________________________

Are you licensed, or do you plan to seek licensure, as a professional engineer (PE)?

o Yes, I am licensed as a PE.

o Yes, I have completed my EIT certification and plan to seek licensure as a PE.

o No, but I plan to seek licensure in the future.

o No.

Years of full-time, professional work experience? (NOTE: Please include full-time internships.)
_______ years

What is your current job title?

________________________________________________________________

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Which of these most closely align with your current job role? (select all that apply)

▢ Consulting

▢ Education/Training

▢ Engineering Design (product, process, etc.)

▢ Management

▢ Manufacturing

▢ Operations

▢ Quality Control/Assurance

▢ Research and Development

▢ Other: __________________________________________

Which best describes the level of your position in your employing organization?

o Entry Level

o Individual Contributor

o Project Manager

o Mid-Level Manager

o Top-Level Manager

o Executive/C-Level

o Other: ________________________________________________

Which best describes the industry or sector in which you are now working? (select all that apply)

▢ Aerospace

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▢ Automotive

▢ Computer/Electronic

▢ Chemical

▢ Construction

▢ Education

▢ Financial

▢ Food

▢ Government

▢ Healthcare

▢ Information Technology

▢ Machinery Manufacturing

▢ Military/Defense

▢ Mining

▢ Metal/Metal Products Manufacturing

▢ Non-profit/NGO

▢ Oil and Gas

▢ Retail

▢ Transportation

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 ▢ Utilities

▢ Other: _____________________________

Please briefly describe the specific industry or sector in which you are now working (e.g., If you chose "Utilities"
above, you may provide more details such as electric power generation at nuclear power plant.)
________________________________________________________________

Which best describes the size of your organization?

o 1-50 employees

o 51 - 250 employees

o 251 - 500 employees

o 501 - 1000 employees

o 1001 - 3000 employees

o More than 3001 employees

125
 APPENDIX B. CHAPTER 3 ADDITIONAL ANALYSES

Chapter 3 – Results of Multiple Linear Regression Analysis (for RQ1 and RQ3)
Political Ideology
Variables Model 1 Model 2
𝐵 𝐵
Intercept 3.653 *** 4.645 ***
Moral values
Care -.085 ***
Fairness -.090 ***
Loyalty .049 **
Authority .074 ***
Purity .074 ***
Combined sector
Manufacturing .466 .082
Infrastructure .262 -.036
Consumer .126 -.215
Others .570 .047
Position
Higher position .385 * .181
Age
Older age .474 * .160
Younger age -.282 -.194
Gender
Female -.889 *** -.344 *
Race
Asian -.502 * -.608 ***
Others -.211 -.264
2 .146 .480
R
Adj. R2 .128 .464

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 APPENDIX C. CHAPTER 4 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Chapter 4 – Descriptive Statistics

Clan Adhocracy Market Hierarchy
Shapiro-Wilk Shapiro-Wilk Shapiro-Wilk Shapiro-Wilk
Mean (SD) Mean (SD) Mean (SD) Mean (SD)
Statistic Sig. Statistic Sig. Statistic Sig. Statistic Sig.
All participants 20.62 (5.81) 0.956 <.001 19.57 (5.87) 0.976 <.001 20.83 (4.98) 0.981 .030 20.73 (4.72) 0.981 <.001
By Sector
Automotive 19.03 (6.78) 0.944 .055 19.39 (5.84) 0.972 .453 22.18 (4.56) 0.925 .014 20.26 (5.50) 0.974 .512
Computer/Electronics/IT 21.45 (5.75) 0.935 <.001 22.30 (5.45) 0.937 <.001 21.32 (5.01) 0.977 .129 20.34 (4.65) 0.976 .108
Construction 22.11 (5.32) 0.923 .020 19.03 (5.52) 0.982 .834 19.35 (4.28) 0.975 .632 20.56 (3.60) 0.980 .780
Food 18.87 (5.01) 0.931 .286 17.00 (5.88) 0.966 .799 20.40 (4.98) 0.956 .624 20.13 (5.21) 0.910 .133
Government 23.00 (3.85) 0.940 .344 18.44 (4.21) 0.951 .499 16.50 (4.70) 0.948 .458 22.81 (4.02) 0.959 .649
Healthcare 22.29 (4.21) 0.953 .140 20.17 (5.43) 0.961 .239 20.94 (4.82) 0.989 .975 21.51 (4.14) 0.957 .190
Manufacturing – Other 19.57 (6.50) 0.946 .003 19.13 (6.44) 0.951 .005 21.20 (5.49) 0.984 .452 20.46 (4.80) 0.943 .002
Military/Defense/Aerosp
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19.90 (5.10) 0.958 .144 18.05 (5.19) 0.964 .235 20.78 (4.21) 0.971 .382 21.68 (4.70) 0.965 .244
ace
Oil and Gas/Mining 17.50 (6.20) 0.951 .134 18.51 (5.65) 0.974 .560 21.00 (5.83) 0.980 .764 18.80 (5.12) 0.962 .265
Retail 21.20 (3.77) 0.907 .263 20.80 (5.20) 0.947 .638 22.00 (2.94) 0.921 .367 19.50 (3.14) 0.795 .012
Transportation 22.55 (5.50) 0.867 .010 20.75 (6.66) 0.935 .307 21.25 (4.83) 0.931 .160 22.10 (3.80) 0.974 .829
Utilities 19.86 (6.64) 0.857 .001 17.83 (6.92) 0.975 .047 20.17 (5.52) 0.941 .104 21.31 (5.56) 0.968 .500
Consulting 21.07 (6.84) 0.924 .250 18.07 (6.76) 0.949 .028 19.46 (3.95) 0.981 .979 20.14 (5.76) 0.855 .034
Consumer Products 21.04 (4.37) 0.973 .726 17.76 (5.18) 0.933 .775 19.80 (4.23) 0.966 .556 21.32 (4.58) 0.937 .125
Other 21.66 (5.38) 0.950 .073 20.37 (5.03) 0.941 .220 21.83 (5.13) 0.975 .500 21.20 (4.57) 0.965 .229
 APPENDIX D. INTERVIEW PROTOCOL

Background Questions:
Okay. To begin, could you tell me a little bit about yourself, like a 30-second elevator speech about
who you are?
• What led you to the [field] and how did you get the job in your current organization with
that role?

Section 1. Ethnographic Interview (for organizational culture)

[Transition]
I would like to find out what it’s like to work as an engineer in your company in [field] industry.
I would like to know what you do each day, the problems you have, just everything that goes into
being an engineer in your organization.

1) Descriptive questions
a. [Grand tour question] I have heard what is it like working as an engineer, but I’ve never
been to [field] and I don’t know what takes place there on a typical date. Could you start
at the beginning of a day, say a typical day in your company and describe what goes on?
Like, what do you do when you first arrive your workplace, and what do you do next?
o Could you also describe your weekly work schedule?
o Do you work mostly in a team or in silo?
o Any regular event within your company?
o If I got a job in your organization and worked there, what would I have to know to
do a good job and survive and make sense out of what goes on?

b. [Mini-tour question] You said that you would [daily task]. Could you describe for me
what goes on when you [daily task]?
o Who would you interact with when you do [daily task]?
c. [Example question] Could you give me an example of [task/event]?
d. [Native language question] How do you refer to [terminology interviewee used]?
a. [Hypothetical-interaction question] I’m interested in the way you (engineers)
would talk to each other at work. If I were sit in the back of [space that interviewee
mentioned], what kind of thigs would I hear [people that interviewee mentioned]
saying to each other?

2) Survey follow-up (OCAI)

I would like to ask some questions related to the survey you completed, especially about the
questions related to the organizational culture. Do you mind if I share my screen to see your
response together?
a. [Dominant characteristics] You indicated your organization is [answer].

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 b. [Organizational leadership] You indicated the leadership in your organization is
generally considered to exemplify [answer].
c. [Management of employees] You indicated the management style of the organization is
characterized by [answer].
d. [Organization glue] You indicated the glue that holds the organization together is
[answer].
e. [Strategic emphasis] You indicated that your organization emphasizes [answer].
f. [Criteria of success] You indicated that your organization defines success on the basis of
[answer].

g. Do you think your organization is unique in those elements? How do you see the
relationship between your organization and overall culture in your field?
h. Could you describe how government regulations and industry standards impact practices
of your organization?
i. How do government regulations and technical standards affect other aspects of the
culture of your organization?
j. Beyond what you just described, could you think of any impact of other related laws and
policies on the practices of your organization?

Section 2. Narrative Inquiry (for moral narrative)

Thank you very much! That was the first part of the interview. Now I would like to shift our gear
to more personal question. In the second half of the interview, I would like to hear more about
your own experience and perspective – your own story.

1) Life story centered on formation of moral/ethical values

a. I am curious, if there is something important to you as a person before you are an
engineer, what is it? For example, your personal faith, moral values, and political
perspectives…
b. Could you share how you have developed those faith and values? Please describe key
scenes in your life story.
c. If there is something important to you as an engineer, what is it?
d. Could you share how you have developed those values as an enigneer? Please describe
key scens in your career.
e. How are your values as an enigneer related to your personal faith, moral values, and
political perspectives?
f. [Survey follow-up: Big Five] How do you see yourself? Could you elaborate a little bit
about your personality?
o How do you think it is related to your values?

2) Link to culture
In the first half of the interview, we had quite a long conversation about your daily work and
organization.

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 a. What do you think important values in your workplace are?
b. What do you think engineering ethics is in your workplace?
c. Could you give me an example? Did you have any specific experience related to that?

d. How do your values as an engineer and as a person, such as personal faith, moral values,
and political perspectives compare with those of your current organization? (If not, why?)
i. Are those aligned in general?
ii. Have you ever experienced any conflict between your personal and
organizational values?
e. What do you think important values are in your field in general?
f. What do you think engineering ethics is in your field in general?
g. Could you give me an example? Did you have any specific experience related to that?
h. How do you think your values as an engineer and as a person, such as personal faith,
moral values, and political perspectives, have been influenced by your field in general?
(If not, why?)

Is there anything else that you want to add about the culture of your workplace and your field, or
your values and its formation trajectory that you don’t feel like we have talked about already?

130
 APPENDIX E. EXAMPLE MORAL NARRATIVES

Narrative 1: Sophia
I am a biomedical engineer with undergraduate degree in biomedical engineering and
master’s degree in health informatics. Since I finished my undergrad, I have been working at the
same pharmaceutical company for the last five and a half years.
I think it’s so important to understand that the world is not always the nicest place and it's
important to have people that are pushing positive insights forward. I don't know that there's any
specific thing that's happened in my life to make me feel that way, maybe it's just my upbringing
from my parents, but I always just wish the absolute best for everyone. I would like to think that
when it's my time to go that I’m happy and proud of the achievements that I’ve done, and I try to
live my life with those values rooted in who I am every day.
When I was in high school, I’ve always been very acquainted to math and science, and I
knew I wanted to be in an area where I could make a lot of impact. In high school, I happen to
have a former high school students that came back, and they discussed their experiences in
biomedical engineering at University A. And I felt that there are so many health challenges in the
world. When I’m working on any healthcare related type of activities, I feel that I’m really making
an impact on a broader portion of the world, so, for me healthcare just always seemed the right
place to be. But I wasn't that interested in interfacing with patients directly and I thought
engineering helped me find that right balance between wanting to be in the healthcare space
without necessarily wanting to interface with patients directly.
I started out in a rotational development program in my current company, and currently I
work on the portfolio program management. In our department, we oversee our entire R&D
pipeline. I manage the enterprise platform which is a software that we use to do all of the timeline
budgeting and resourcing for the organization. We are constantly iterating to bring in the right
information that leadership needs to review our pipeline. Also, we have to report back to
stakeholders at quarterly earnings calls and things like that, so the platform that I manage day to
day, we're really using the data that's in there to make sure that as a company we're making the
right decisions scientifically, financially, and timeline wise, versus potential competitors in the
market, as well as understanding, where the patient need is. So this platform that I have, we like
incorporate all the information. But when we make decisions, one of the most important values we
consider is patient-focus.
There are so many things that we do internally to push patients first and I love that. I value
that and that's why I’ve stayed for the last five years. It's very important that we don't just look at
the work that we do. We have the end goal. How this is going to change the lives of people is very
important. That's something that we emphasize truly across the board and I’m so very appreciative
of that. I love that we do will have actual patients have on our drugs come and talk about what this
drug has done to their lifestyle. For example, you know, for oncology patients, some of them say
I was able to watch my child get married or go to college. At the end of the day, if we impact one
person's life enough to make them happy that is so incredibly important to me and, I know that
we're doing that, on such a larger scale as well, which really helps me just resonate with what I’m

131
doing every day. To drive lives, to improve for patients… that's one thing I think with the patient
focus I just love that we do.
Any singular product that you work on whether that's a drug, or a medical device, the
amount of people that will have an influence on in a positive one, is very substantial. I think I feel
that. Anytime I do work on something that has been successful, it's very… it's fun. When
something gets approved it's… you've worked so hard to put so much time and energy into
something and now you're getting to impact people at such a grand scale. And I really like that
aspect of my work.

Narrative 2: Olivia
I studied electrical engineering for my undergrad and Ph.D., and then I did my postdoc for
two and a half years. During the postdoc, I found my current job in the national lab in Region A
as a material scientist. I’ve been working in my current job for about two years. So in the national
lab, sometimes we are called a user facility, because we have a lot of expensive equipment and
instruments that we offer to users. So, users can be students or professors from anywhere around
the world, and then they will write proposal to apply for time so that we can do experiments for
them. So, part of my job, is actually doing experiments and collaborating with outside people, so
people from America or from other places. And so, I have to do the planning about how they're
going to do the experiments and do it for them and do the data analysis.
Personally, I’m very task oriented, I like to solve problems. I think for me the problem-
solving thing is more of a personality thing – I’m just curious, and I want to solve the problems. I
care a lot about the solution and the truth and facts and all that, and I try to be very objective. That's
good for my job. As a scientist engineer, you have to be objective. This kind of personality thing,
kind of built into my choice of career. Also, I care a lot about honesty. When you're doing science,
I think it's always good to be honest. I think honesty, it's a very important thing, especially in
science and engineering. But I think, not just for people in science and engineering, it should be a
general value that people should embrace because it's the right thing to do. Nobody likes being
lied to. If you do not want to be lied to, then, why would you lie to people? Since I was a kid, I
just find it so it's a very logical thing to do. So, for me it's a logical thing to be honest, and also in
the bigger view it's also better for everyone because once person start to live for selfish reasons or
for whatever reason, and then it propagates and then become a mess.
So what I mean by honesty is, for example, not cheating and not making up data. Not
anyone I know of, but I’ve heard that people make up false data to get publication, you make false
statements on purpose, so I think those are obviously the wrong thing. Also, if you collaborate
with someone, in there you kind of have an agreement on something like you do this, I do this, and
how we publish about authorship and all that and if people kind of goes back on the deal, I also
feel that's not a very honest thing to do. If you promise that you'll get certain authorship after you
do certain work, but then after you did the work, they're like, “Oh, what agreement? We never had
that.” it's terrible.
So that’s about my work, task-oriented side of me. And I think all the things I do outside
of work it's… equally, or sometimes more important things than I do at work. Not to diminish the
work I’m doing you know; I’m getting paid for it. So I work certain hours, but I don't spend my

132
whole life on it. You know, sometimes you have to do experiments a bit more about 40 to 50 hours
a week that's what they're getting from me, so outside from that, I kind of do my own stuff.
I’m quite involved in a lot of church and charities. So, one American church and one Asian
church. There's like tons of charity work that we're doing, and some of them I organized, some of
them I just participate. You know, they include simple things from like, before the school starts,
there's school drive things, so you give away free school supplies. And on Christmas, we give out
like free gifts and set up like a free shopping thing so families are in need, they can come and shop
for the kids for free. I also help with organizing outing events for cancer society, and I was also
doing fundraise for a lot of children impacted by AIDS in an Asian country. So yeah, there's a lot
of ways that we can do things like that. So, for me personally, I would say they're equally important
– my humanity side.
So, my workplace is very result-oriented and publicity oriented, and this aligns well with
my task-oriented side of me. I don't expect my workplace organization to cover you know, charity
work. I know they do have some charity work but on a smaller scale, and I think that's also
reasonable, because the goal of the lab is to… produce results, not to do charity.

Narrative 3: Graham
My undergraduate degree is in chemical engineering, and I have a master's degree in safety,
security and emergency management. After graduation, I worked for two chemical companies as
a process engineer before getting into HSE. I have primarily been in chemicals/petrochemicals and
refining since 1983. In my 40 years, I’ve seen some minor incidents and several large incidents
primarily in my refining work. I've seen people do stupid things that did not make sense that
resulted in totally preventable accidents.
The worst thing that's ever happened in my career happened at refinery A at Region A. We
had two people killed. We had two separate accidents, six months apart at that refinery. In the first
incident, the supervisor for that area of the refinery overrode my PPE requirements, and people
got hurt because they didn't have the right PPE on.
When the first one happened, I was a first responder for the accident. I had never put a man
in an ambulance before that I knew was going to die, as he was burned over 95% of his body. That
bothered me for a long time. The second incident involved the Operations Manager at the refinery
ignoring Process Safety rules and ordering a glass rotameter installed on a hydrofluoric (HF) acid
unit. HF actually etches glass and is forbidden in a HF unit. I had been moved out of that area but
would have been the person who would have caught the lack of PSM procedures being followed.
The glass rotameter blew out in the face of a colleague on the emergency response team and he
died right in front of the four of us trying to save him. After the second incident, I actually went
and got professional help. I was having nightmares, I was seeing the people die all over again. If
you ever have to go through something like that, it's real trauma. I went through all that, the trauma
of all those two incidents, so I spent about six months with a therapist, one time a week. I wrote
letters to those I blamed about all the anger that I had about the incident and gave them to the
therapist. I left and changed jobs, and that was the best thing I’ve ever did. I got a life in new place
and was able to get peace of mind again. The therapist had told me that the only way I would get
away from the nightmares was to change cities and companies.

133
 After four years, I can talk about it now, and I can tell people, this is why you don't want
to do certain things. I talk about them and say I’ve seen things I don't ever want you to see. I’ve
been through things I don't ever want you to go through. And this is why we tried to do this, this
way or that way, to make things happen the right way. For example, we’re governed by OSHA
that covers the occupational safety and process safety. So for OSHA, people need to remember
that the OSHA regulations are written in blood. Every single regulation out there involves the
history of people get hurt or killed. But the OSHA regulations are the minimum states that you
need to be applying. They're not the maximum, then the minimum standards so in most companies,
they want to do the right thing you get more conservative than OSHA.
I often tell people that if you do something, you may not be the person that gets hurt but it
may be the one standing next to you. I’ve seen enough of that over my years; the person that does
the wrong thing is not the one who gets hurt but rather the person standing next to him, I’ve tried
to take my experiences and influence other people by saying, we want to do it the right way and
we don't want you to be the next person who would experience such a trauma. The hardest thing
I’ve ever done in my life was to go to the funeral of the gentleman that died right front of me.
In my current job, there are four plants that I have direct responsibility for and three that I
help when my counterpart is not available. Any one of those plants, can call me 24/7 and say I
need help. I do occupational safety, process safety, industrial hygiene, emergency response,
environmental, and DOT (we have a fleet based in two of my plants). I am a regional health, safety,
environmental manager in my company. My goal is to make sure my people go home at night, the
same way as they came to work this morning. In your job, the worst thing you can do to is try to
cover something up that went wrong. You should try to share what happened with your colleagues
and work through it so that it can be fixed. I've had to fire two or three employees in my time
because they just did not want to obey the rules that were designed for their own safety. Taking
shortcuts is not acceptable. I had to make these people seek other employment for their own safety
and wellbeing. I said, I’m not going to let to you hurt yourself; you need to find a different job
because you just can't handle this.
Outside of my work, my family has always been religious. I was brought up religious and
going to church, so that's how I have developed a lot of my values that I passed that along to my
two sons. My wife is of the same faith as I am, so we pass that along our sons and now they're
passing that along to their family. When I was having the issues in my workplace, I met our
minister and the others, and based on that, I had a lot of support… a lot of people praying for me.
To get through it, I had a lot of friends in church that came out and just put their arm around me
and told me they appreciated me and things like that. They knew I was going through a hard time
and so all of those together helped me get through that. The therapist I went to was a Christian
counselor who had the same faith that I was in. He worked with me on how I could get past this
trauma and what I needed to do to get peace of mind. I'm still friends with him today.

Narrative 4: Margaret
I did my bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, and since my graduation, I’ve been
working in the automotive industry over 30 years. With a combination of good luck and
opportunity that I had, I was continually able to move up in the organization, and I am currently
Vice President of quality in my company. I have responsibility for the overall quality philosophy

134
and process for the company. In my personal life, I’m currently divorced, I have two adult children,
I live by myself with my dog. Currently I spend a lot of time at work.
I think one of the things that's important to me is to be a good person. It’s potentially based
within my religious upbringing and the lessons I learned throughout my whole career. Say that you
have a problem that you need to resolve. To me it's very important to understand systemically what
caused that problem to happen and what we need to change in our processes or procedures to be
able to help people resolve that. I’ve always been a person where if I’ve suffered through
something that's very frustrating, I want to give other people a heads up and let them... not have to
deal with the same thing. I don't want to hide my mistake, I want to figure out well what
information didn’t I have, why did I make this mistake, who didn’t I talk to. And then I want to
tell, I mean, it's just part of my DNA, to want to tell people to fix those problems. And that's kind
of the way I approached quality.
I think this is also related, but in a different context. An engineering job is a good job that
you can raise a family on with one wage earner. Historically, in engineering, there was always…
an expectation that you would be available outside of work hours and that if you wanted to move
up the organization you would work harder. Because there was always an expectation that there
was someone involved to help you take care of your childcare and, to be honest, that was the same
for me. Even though I was a woman, my husband was a stay-at-home dad. So, I made all the same
sacrifices and tradeoffs that the men made to get to the to move up through the organization. The
travel, the longer hours, because, especially, you know, the need to put in those extra hours or to
be visible or to do those things were a major part of being promoted within the company. And I
was able to do that, because my husband did all the staining things that were necessary.
So I think this is something that, all companies are currently struggling with: My vision of
equal rights first off was that, anybody could have whatever job that they wanted. It could be a
man or a woman, but now, the issue is how do you make it so it's possible for two people to work
and be fulfilled and not be working constantly. I could not have done my job along the way, if we
didn't have a stay-at-home parent for my kids. So I think now what my company is trying to do is
they're trying to change those norms and actively trying to figure out how to mentor women.
In fact, you know, I've never… never been that held back by being a woman. And I always
laugh when, this thing about, you know, people having to say, “don't interrupt me, I’m talking” or
whatever. In my whole life, I’ve never told anyone not to interrupt me. I just kept plowing ahead.
In my whole career no one interrupted me because I didn't let myself get interrupted. I don't know
if I inherently knew or I learned early, but you do need to have a seat at the table. One of the things
that I did do was I would make an effort to sit at the table and not sit at the back. I did make an
effort to be included. You need to make an effort to be included. There are some people that are
automatically included, such as people who are big, more assertive, and more aggressive… but
some of the men are not included either. So one of the things that I would say to my team, if they
say, “well, they never invite me to the meeting,” then I say, “Well, you need to then think about
your behavior they're not inviting you why, because for some reason you're not value-added in that
meeting. So what do you need to do to make that they would never think to not invite you?” Right?
So, for a while, you have to push your way in. In my whole life I’ve just always pushed my way
in.
But at the same time, one of the things that I’ve grown over the last couple of years is…
about inclusivity and belonging. So we had kind of a in-group out-group discussion at work, and

135
it was like part of what groups are you in and out of. It was interesting because now that I’m
divorced, I’m kind of in an out-group. So most everybody at work is married, and there used to be
a… kind of... an understanding that you would be married because that showed that you are
responsible. Right? If you were married and had a family, you are ready to move up the ladder,
because that was showing a level of responsibility. With that in mind, the key moment for me to
become interested in the topic is being part of my church.
So they're currently going through a discussion about whether gay marriages can be
allowed and whether there can be gay clergy, and that was when I first realized that there may be
people that did not feel they are included. Indeed, when I was going through my divorce, my
church really helped me. It was really comforting for me to go to church and get communion
through my divorce and through other things. That feeling of belonging, it really hit me that… I
was so sad that there were people that didn't that could have gone or interacted with my church
and didn’t feel the same way as me. And I didn't realize it for so long. So that made me kind of…
feel very ashamed that I was so comfortable in myself that I really wasn't thinking about other
people.
And one of the things that I’ve also feel is that if COVID… if we hadn't been on lockdown,
I don't think I would have reacted and learned, all the same thing that I learned before because I
didn't have time. I was running 1000 miles an hour, you know, doing my job, taking care of my
kids, you know, working overseas. You know, just all about that, so I was grateful, in a way that
COVID had me slow-down that I could actually… You know, read some books and understand
how some people felt and I made an effort to you know put myself in there in other people's skin
and you know how things would work if what if that happened to me, you know, in the hypocrisy,
you know, a lot of different things of you know, believing one thing and then acting in a different
way, or whatever.
So, in my company, there's an actual focus on, you know, “okay Margaret, let's look at
your organization, where are the women, where are the people of color, what can we do to help
them continue to move off, what kind of mentoring, what kind of help?” So I think that makes me
happier and more fulfilled. I feel, now like, 20% of my job is just doing the quality but it's
making… almost being like an elder statesman and making things better for people and trying to
drive that inclusivity through the organization.

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 APPENDIX F. RECRUITMENT MESSAGE AND CONSENT FORM

RECRUITMENT MESSAGE (SURVEY)

Engineers' Views of Ethics and Social Responsibility (Survey)

What values are most important for engineers? How are ethics and social responsibility
understood by technical professionals? How do engineers understand the climate and culture of
their organizations? These are the kinds of questions we are exploring in our NSF-funded
research project, “Engineers’ Views of Ethics and Social Responsibility” (Purdue IRB protocol
IRB-2020-748).

In the first part of our study, we are recruiting engineers from various sectors to complete a
survey. For completing our 20- to 30-minute survey, you will have the option of submitting your
contact information and being entered into a drawing for a $100 gift card (with a 1 in 20 odds of
winning). If you submit your contact information at the end of the survey (optional), we may
invite you to a follow-up interview based on your survey response. If you complete an interview,
you will receive a $100 gift card.

If you have questions about this study, please contact principal investigator Brent K. Jesiek (765-
496-1531, [email protected]) or graduate research assistant Dayoung Kim
([email protected]).

Note that this study is not related to any organization where recruitment has occurred, and your
employer will not know if you have participated. Participation in this study is strictly voluntary,
and you can withdraw at any time without penalty. Your decision not to participate has no
negative consequences for you.

Thanks for your time and consideration,

Brent K. Jesiek, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Engineering Education
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907
E-mail: [email protected]

RESEARCH PARTICIPANT CONSENT FORM

Engineers’ Views of Ethics and Social Responsibility (Survey Phase)
PI: Brent K. Jesiek, School of Engineering Education, Purdue University

Key Information
Please take time to review this information carefully. This is a research study. Your participation
in this study is voluntary which means that you may choose not to participate at any time without
penalty or loss of benefits to which you are otherwise entitled. You may ask questions to the
researchers about the study whenever you would like. If you decide to take part in the study, you

137
will be asked to sign this form, be sure you understand what you will do and any possible risks or
benefits.

What is the purpose of this study?

The purpose of this study is to investigate how engineers understand and experience ethics,
social responsibility, and related concerns in their workplaces. Results from this research may
inspire improvements to engineering ethics education for students and professionals. This study
is planned to run for about three years, and we intend to recruit up to 800 total survey
respondents.

What will I do if I choose to be in this study?

You will be asked to complete a survey comprised of questions and prompts related to ethics,
social responsibility, and related concepts. The estimated time required to take the survey is 30
minutes or less.

How long will I be in the study?

You will take a single survey that will require up to about 30 minutes to complete. You may also
be invited to participate in a follow-up interview with a member of our research team.

What are the possible risks or discomforts?

There are minimal risks associated with participation in this study. These risks are no greater
than what you would encounter in daily life or during the performance of routine physical or
psychological exams or tests. Breach of confidentiality is always a risk with data, but we will
take precautions to minimize this risk as described in the confidentiality section.

Are there any potential benefits?

You are not guaranteed any direct personal benefits as a result of participating in this study.
However, the eventual results of this study may increase overall knowledge about how engineers
perceive and experience ethics and social responsibility in their workplaces.

Will I receive payment or other incentive?

You will be entered into a drawing for a $100 gift card for completing the survey. The odds of
winning are 1 in 20. Drawings will be carried out and payments made once a week while this
survey is active.

According to the rules of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), payments that are made to you as a
result of your participation in a study may be considered taxable income.

Are there costs to me for participation?

There are no anticipated costs to participate in this research.

Will information about me and my participation be kept confidential?

All efforts will be made to maintain confidentiality throughout the duration of the project. Other
than the members of the research team, no one will know you participated in the study. Your e-
mail address and full name will be requested and used only to (1) enter you into a drawing for a
gift card, and (2) invite possible participation in a follow-up interview. Participant identities will

138
be coded with randomly generated ID numbers for all data analysis, presentation, and publication
efforts. All identifiers will be permanently removed from the research data after all survey and
interview data collection is complete, and no paper records will be retained. All de-identified
electronic data will be stored securely and indefinitely in Purdue’s PURR repository. The
project’s research records and protocols may be reviewed by departments at Purdue University
responsible for regulatory and human subjects research oversight.

What are my rights if I take part in this study?

You do not have to participate in this research project. If you agree to participate, you may
withdraw your participation at any time without penalty. To withdraw from the study simply
indicate to the researcher that you no longer wish to participate. You will be unable to withdraw
your data from the study once the data is de-identified.

Who can I contact if I have questions about the study?

If you have questions, comments or concerns about this research project, you can talk to one of
the researchers. Please contact PI Brent K. Jesiek (765-496-1531, [email protected]).

To report anonymously via Purdue’s Hotline see www.purdue.edu/hotline

If you have questions about your rights while taking part in the study or have concerns about the
treatment of research participants, please call the Human Research Protection Program at (765)
494-5942, email ([email protected]) or write to:

Human Research Protection Program - Purdue University

Ernest C. Young Hall, Room 1032
155 S. Grant St.
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2114

RECRUITMENT MESSAGE (INTERVIEW)

Dear [NAME]:

A few months ago, you completed a survey about various aspects of engineers’ social and ethical
responsibility. First of all, thank you for taking the survey and indicating your willingness to be
contacted again!

We are currently conducting follow-up interviews for the study, and I wonder if you might still
be interested in doing an interview with us. If you participate, you will be asked a series of
questions related to your perceptions of social and ethical responsibility in professional practice.

The estimated maximum time to conduct an interview is approximately 90 minutes, and

participants will receive a $100 gift card for completing an interview.

If you participate, you will be interviewed in confidence and not identified in published findings.
Also note that this study is in no way related to any organization where recruitment has occurred

139
(company, professional association, etc.), and your organization will not know whether or not
you have participated. Participation in this study is strictly voluntary, and you can withdraw at
any time without penalty. Your decision not to participate has no negative consequences for you.

Thanks for your time and consideration,

Dayoung Kim

PhD Candidate, MSChE, Bilsland Fellow

School of Engineering Education
Purdue University
LinkedIn | www.dayoungkim.org

INFORMATION FOR PARTICIPANTS (INTERVIEW)

Hello, my name is Dayoung Kim. I am a Ph.D. candidate in Engineering Education at Purdue

University. Thank you very much for your participation in this study.

The goal of this interview is to understand the culture of the organization you work for as an
engineer, as well as how your ethical perspective as an engineer have been formed throughout your
career, especially within your field and current organization. Therefore, this interview will consist
of two parts. In the first half of the interview, I will ask questions related to your daily work within
your organization. In the second half, I will ask more personal questions such as your personal
value and value as an engineer. Since engineering ethics is defined broadly including collective
social responsibility of engineering profession, the values questions may include questions about
your perspectives on broader society, such as political perspectives.

To acknowledge, I don’t know anything about your organization and your daily work, so I really
want to learn those from you through this interview. Also, there are clearly no right or wrong
answers, and no right or wrong perspectives. I simply want to understand what you think.
Throughout this interview, I may ask some follow-up questions to better understand your daily
work and your own perspective. I may also ask some follow-up questions related to the survey you
completed throughout the interview.

Your participation is voluntary, and you can stop at any time. Also, you do not need to share any
confidential information about your employer. Please only share what you think as relevant. I will
audio-record our conversation, but I want to remind you that this is a confidential interview and
your participation and responses will be de-identified and held in strict confidence. The audio file
will be permanently deleted after the audio is transcribed. I will not reveal it in any form to others
outside of my research team. Also, if any of the content you shared during the interview seems to
be inappropriate, please tell me after the interview. I will not include them in the final data.

140
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 VITA

Dayoung Kim
E-mail: [email protected] | Website: www.dayoungkim.org
Address: 701 West Stadium Avenue, West Lafayette, IN 47907

EDUCATION
Ph.D., Engineering Education, 2022
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
(Academic Advisors: Brent K. Jesiek and Michael C. Loui)
Teaching and Learning in Engineering Graduate Certificate, 2022
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
M.S., Chemical Engineering, 2021
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
B.S., Chemical Engineering, 2017
Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea

RESEARCH INTERESTS TEACHING INTERESTS

To address the big question, how to support the Undergraduate Courses
ethical and innovative practice of engineering • Engineering Ethics/Ethical Leadership
professionals in business settings within complex • Chemical Engineering Calculations
social, economic, and political environments, I am • Chemical Reaction Engineering
broadly interested in legal/regulatory/policy • Chemical Engineering
environments across various employment sectors Thermodynamics
of engineers as well as their interaction with • Statistical Methods in Engineering
ethical and innovative practice in engineering. • Introduction to Programming
Topics of interest include: (MATLAB)
• Engineering Ethics; Engineering Practice; • Introduction to Engineering Design
Regulatory and Policy Impacts on
Engineering Practice; Organizational Culture; Graduate Courses
Industry-Academia-Government Partnership; • Quantitative and Qualitative Research
Lifelong Learning; Chemical Engineers’ Methods
Industry Experience; Chemical Engineering
• Teaching and Learning in Engineering
Education

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE
Research Assistant
NSF#2024301: Collaborative Research: Early Career Engineers’ Since Fall 2021
Views of Ethics and Social Responsibility: Trends, Influences, and
Contexts
(PI: Brent K. Jesiek, Engineering Education, Purdue University)

153
 NSF#2044390: Developing a Cultural Mindset Module for Improving Fall 2021
Multicultural Engineering Team Effectiveness
(PI: Franki Y. H. Kung, Industrial-Organizational Psychology,
Purdue University)
NSF#1737303: Understanding and Evaluating Ethical Engineering Since Spring 2018
Practice
(PI: Andrew O. Brightman, Biomedical Engineering, Purdue
University)
NSF#1449479: Foundations of Social and Ethical Responsibility Fall 2017
Among Undergraduate Engineering Students: Comparing Across – Summer 2021
Time, Institutions, and Interventions
(PI: Brent K. Jesiek, Engineering Education, Purdue University)
Explorer Fellowship Project
Enhancing Engineering Education by Integrating the Reflection and Fall 2017
Feedback Cycle with Mobile Technologies
(PI: Muhsin Menekse, Engineering Education, Purdue University)
Bachelor’s Thesis
Thesis Topic: Fractionation of Polystyrene and Analysis Fall 2016
(Polymer Thin Film and Analysis Laboratory, Yonsei University,
Seoul, Korea)

PUBLICATIONS
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
Kim, D., Jesiek, B. K., & Mazzurco, A. (2022). Development and validation of the Sojourn
Readiness Assessment (SRA): Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, and translation
to Chinese. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 88, 95-105.
Howland, S. J., Kim, D., & Jesiek, B. K. (2022). Senior engineering students’ reflection on their
learning of ethics and morality: A qualitative investigation of influences and lessons learned.
International Journal of Ethics Education. (Published; Online first).
Kim, D. (2022). Promoting professional socialization: A synthesis of Durkheim, Kohlberg, Hoffman,
and Haidt for professional ethics education. Business and Professional Ethics Journal, 41(1), 93-
114.
Kim, D., Jesiek, B. K., & Howland, S. J. (2021). Longitudinal investigation of moral disengagement
among undergraduate engineering students: Findings from a mixed-methods study. Ethics &
Behavior. (Published; Online first)
Kim, D., Jesiek, B. K., Zoltowski, C. B., Loui, M. C., & Brightman, A. O. (2020). An academic-
industry partnership for preparing the next generation of ethical engineers for professional
practice. Advances in Engineering Education, 8(3).

Peer-Reviewed Conference Proceedings

Jesiek, B. K., Claussen, S. A., Kim, D., Stepback, L., & Zoltowski, C. B. (2022). Exploring
perceptions of ethics and social responsibility among engineering students and professionals:
Research highlights and implications for the field. Proceedings of the 2022 ASEE Annual
Conference and Exposition, Minneapolis, MN.

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Kim, D., Jesiek, B. K., & Loui, M. C. (2021). Moral narratives of practicing engineers across
industry sectors for engineering ethics education. Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE Frontiers
in Education Conference, Lincoln, NE.
Kim, D., Jesiek, B. K., Loui, M. C., & Huff, C. (2021). Work-in-progress: Organizational culture and
engineers’ moral values across industry sectors: Study overview. Proceedings of the 2021 ASEE
Annual Conference and Exposition, Virtual.
Kim, D. & Kerr, A. J. (2021). Chemical engineers’ experience of ethics in health products industry.
Proceedings of the 2021 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Virtual.
Kim, D., Howland, S. J., & Jesiek, B. K. (2021). Encountering engineering ethics in the workplace:
Stories from the trenches. Proceedings of the 2021 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition,
Virtual. (Finalist, Engineering Ethics Division Best Paper Award)
Kim, D., Hess, J. L., & Fila, N. D. (2020). Applying critical incident technique to identify potential
causes of changes in ways of experiencing ethical engineering practice. Proceedings of the 2020
ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Virtual.
Zoltowski, C. B., Hess, J. L., Fila, N. D., Kim, D., Kerr, A. J., Loui, M. C., & Brightman, A. O. (2020).
Ways of experiencing ethics in engineering practice: Variation and integration. Proceedings of the
2020 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Virtual.
Zoltowski, C. B., Jesiek, B. K., Claussen, S. A., Howland, S. M. J., Kim, D., & Nittala, S. (2020).
Foundations of social and ethical responsibility among undergraduate engineering students:
Overview of results. Proceedings of the 2020 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Virtual.
Kim, D. (2019). Investigating individual engineers' moral personality: Socialization and judgment.
Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Cincinnati, OH.
Kim, D. & Jesiek, B. K. (2019). Work-in-progress: Emotion and intuition in engineering students’
ethical decision-making and its implications for engineering ethics education. Proceedings of the
2019 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Tampa, FL.
Fila, N. D., Zoltowski, C. B., Hess, J. L., Kim, D., Kerr, A. J., Brightman, A. O., & Loui, M. C. (2019).
Work-in-progress: Considering the impact on research quality of a team approach to
phenomenography. Proceedings of the 2019 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Tampa,
FL.
Kim, D., Odom, P. W., Zoltowski, C. B., & Jesiek, B. K. (2018). Investigating moral disengagement
among first-year engineering students. Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education
Conference, San Jose, CA. (Finalist, Benjamin Dasher Best Paper Award)
Brightman, A. O., Fila, N. D., Hess, J. L., Kerr, A. J., Kim, D., Loui, M. C., & Zoltowski, C. B. (2018).
Applying phenomenography to develop a comprehensive understanding of ethics in engineering
practice. Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, San Jose, CA.
Nittala, S., Zephirin, T., Howland, S. M. J., Kim, D., Katz, A. S., & Jesiek, B. K. (2018). Investigating
influences on first-year engineering students’ views of ethics and social responsibility.
Proceedings of the 2018 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Salt Lake City, UT.
Anwar, S., Heo, D., Menekse, M., & Kim, D. (2018). Work-in-progress: Students’ reflection quality
and effective team membership. Proceedings of the 2018 ASEE Annual Conference and
Exposition, Salt Lake City, UT.

Invited Guest Editorial

Kim, D. (2021). Social intuitionism suggests engineering educators consider ethics education as a long-
term socialization process. SEFI (The European Society for Engineering Education) Newsletter
06/2021.

155
AWARDS
College of Engineering Outstanding Research Award 2022
College of Engineering, Purdue University
Finalist, Engineering Ethics Division Best Paper Award 2021
ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition
Best Formal Paper by a Graduate Student Award 2020
Association for Practical and Professional Ethics
Finalist, Benjamin Dasher Best Paper Award 2018
IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference

FELLOWSHIPS AND SCHOLARSHIPS

Lillian Gilbreth Postdoctoral Fellowship (offered but declined) August 2022
College of Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA – July 2024
Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Graduate Fellowship March 2022
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, – May 2022
Washington DC, USA
Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship Summer 2021 &
College of Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA Spring 2022
Explorer Fellowship Fall 2017
School of Engineering Education, Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA
Creativity Development and Application Student Fellowship Fall 2015
Creativity Engineering Institute, Seoul, South Korea
National Scholarship Spring 2013
Korea Student Aid Foundation, Seoul, South Korea -Fall 2016
Yonsei Scholarship Spring 2013
Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea -Fall 2016

TEACHING EXPERIENCE
Teaching Assistant
ENE687: Mentored Teaching in Engineering (Instructor: Karl A. Smith) Fall 2020 -
Assisted the instructor with class preparation, led in-class discussions and Spring2021
lectures, and provided feedback on students’ assignments and weekly
reflections
BME595: Ethical Engineering in Medical Devices (Instructor: Andrew O. Spring 2020
Brightman)
Assisted the instructor with class preparation, led in-class discussions and
lectures, and provided feedback on students’ assignments
Volunteer Faculty Apprentice
ENE506: Content, Assessment, and Pedagogy (Instructor: Ruth A. Fall 2019
Streveler)
Assisted the instructor with class preparation, recorded a complementary
content video, and facilitated in-class activities in a flipped-learning
environment April 16, 2021
Guest Lecture (Invited)
BME594: Ethical Engineering of Medical Technologies, Purdue University

156
PROFESSIONAL SERVICE
Peer Review (the number in the parentheses represents the number of papers reviewed)
Journal of Engineering Education 2020(2)
Science and Engineering Ethics 2019(1), 2020(2), 2021(2)
Studies in Engineering Education 2022(1)
Ethics & Behavior 2020(1)
Computers & Education Open 2021(2)
Journal of International Engineering Education 2021(1)
Business and Professional Ethics Journal 2022(1)
IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference 2018(3), 2019(5), 2020(3), 2021(4)
ASEE Annual Conference 2018(2), 2019(1), 2020(5), 2021(3)
Professional Society
Webmaster, ASEE Engineering Ethics Division Fall 2019 – Summer 2022
Program Committee, IEEE ETHICS-2021: Engineering Spring 2021 – Fall 2021
and Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR)
Co-Chair, APPE STEM Special Interest Section Since Sumer 2021
Mentoring
Advisor of Purdue Engineering Student Team, Spring 2021
Lockheed Martin 2021 Ethics in Engineering Case
Competition
Diversity & Inclusion
First-Generation Student Success Committee, College Since Fall 2021
of Engineering, Purdue University
Engineering Education Community Involvement
Finance Committee Chair, Engineering Education Graduate Summer 2018 – Spring 2019
Student Association
Facilitator of GSF (Global Student Forum) in Seoul, Korea Fall 2016

CONFERENCES AND WORKSHOPS

Conference Presentations
Presenter, Personal moral narratives of practicing engineers: Examples and implications for
professional ethics. 2022 Annual Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE)
International Conference, Cincinnati, OH, Feb. 24-27, 2022.
Invited Panelist, Special session: ETHICS-2021 author meets the critics – engineering ethics:
Contemporary and enduring debates by Deborah Johnson. The IEEE International Symposium
on Technology and Society (ISTAS) 2021 Conference, Virtual, October 28-31, 2021.
Presenter, Moral narratives of practicing engineers across industry sectors for engineering ethics
education. 2021 IEEE Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference, Lincoln, NE, Oct. 13-16, 2021.
(Virtually Presented)
Presenter, Work-in-progress: Organizational culture and engineers’ moral values across industry
sectors: Study overview. 2021 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual
Conference and Exposition, Virtual, July 26-29, 2021.
Presenter, Chemical engineers’ experience of ethics in health products industry. 2021 American
Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference and Exposition, Virtual, July 26-
29, 2021.
Co-Presenter, Encountering engineering ethics in the workplace: Stories from the trenches.
2021 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference and

157
 Exposition, Virtual, July 26-29, 2021. (Finalist, Engineering Ethics Division Best Paper
Award)
Presenter, What aspects of organizational culture can promote ethics in engineering practice?
Insights from the health products industry. 2021 Annual Association for Practical and
Professional Ethics (APPE) International Conference, Virtual, Feb. 25-27, 2021.
Presenter, Applying critical incident technique to identify potential causes of changes in ways of
experiencing ethical engineering practice. 2020 American Society for Engineering Education
(ASEE) Annual Conference and Exposition, Virtual, June 22-26, 2020.
Presenter, Promoting professional socialization: A synthesis of Durkheim, Kohlberg, Hoffman, and
Haidt for professional ethics education. 2020 Annual Association for Practical and Professional
Ethics (APPE) International Conference, Atlanta, GA, Feb. 20-23, 2020. (Best Formal Paper by
a Graduate Student Award)
Presenter, Investigating individual engineers' moral personality: Socialization and judgment. 2019
IEEE Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference Doctoral Symposium, Cincinnati, OH, Oct. 16,
2019.
Presenter, Work-in-progress: Emotion and intuition in engineering students’ ethical decision-
making and its implications for engineering ethics education. 2019 American Society for
Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference and Exposition, Tampa, FL, June
15-19, 2019.
Presenter, Investigating moral disengagement among first-year engineering students. 2018
IEEE Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference, San Jose, CA, Oct. 3-6, 2018. (Finalist,
Benjamin Dasher Best Paper Award)
Presenter, Investigating influences on first-year engineering students’ views of ethics and
social responsibility. 2018 American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual
Conference and Exposition, Salt Lake City, UT, June 24-27, 2018.

Workshops
Panelist, Engineering Ethics Division Special Session: Engineers’ Experiences of Ethics in Practice:
An Interactive Exploration With Six Personas. 2021 American Society for Engineering
Education (ASEE) Annual Conference and Exposition, Virtual, July 29, 2021.
Facilitator, Ethics Advisory Council Workshop. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, April 9,
2021.
Facilitator, Engineering Ethics Division Special Session: Ways of Experiencing Ethics in
Engineering Practice: Implications for Teaching and Research. 2019 American Society for
Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference and Exposition, Tampa, FL, June 17, 2019.
Clerk, Ethics Advisory Council Workshop. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN., April 3, 2019.
Report writer, Ethics Advisory Council Workshop. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, April 3,
2018.

SKILLS
Research Skills
Quantitative research skills (factor analysis, cluster analysis, regression analysis, structural
equation modeling)
Qualitative research skills (phenomenography, narrative inquiry, thematic analysis)
Mixed methods research skills (managing survey and interview data collection and analysis)
Software
R, SPSS, Stata, NVivo, MATLAB, Python, Polymath

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Certificates
CDNA (Creativity Development and Application) Academy Program
Certified by Creativity Engineering Institute, Seoul, South Korea
Languages
Korean (Native), Japanese (Intermediate reading, writing, and speaking)

Last updated June 2022

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