Reconciling Competing Tensions in Ethical Systems: Lessons From the United States Military Academy at West Point

Ethical codes and the systems in which they are situated are complex and intricate, making them difficult for both academicians and practitioners to research and understand. Through a qualitative research lens we examine the honor and ethics system at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Our findings suggest that the complexity of ethical systems can be better understood by examining the competing tensions that simultaneously work for and against ethical systems. We find that organizational members at West Point engage in counterintuitive thinking along with reframing and repositioning to negotiate some of these tensions. This approach provides feedback loops that steer the organization away from future ethical failures and long-term ethical declines. Our findings build on and extend several organizational and ethical theories to include environmental scanning, moral awareness, peer justice, the stages of moral development, and hyper-resiliency. We discuss implications for both theory and practice.