The Embrace of Ambiguity: An Existentialist Reframing of Moral Expansion in Organizations

What happens when people in organizations experience moral ambiguity, where established norms, rules, or values no longer suffice, and come to experience their moral responsibilities more expansively? Existing organizational research has approached this phenomenon through concepts such as moral imagination, moral insight, and moral leadership. While this work highlights engagement with moral ambiguity, it has examined moral expansion primarily at a representational or attributional level, rather than as a lived experience. Drawing on the existentialist ethics of Søren Kierkegaard and Simone de Beauvoir, who placed the experience of embracing ambiguity at the center of moral life, this paper theorizes moral expansion as an experiential phenomenon structured through three intertwined relations: to the self, to the world, and to others. Building on their philosophy, we argue how meaningful moral expansion is predicated on the internal orientation with which individuals act under ambiguity, rather than on any specific external outcome of action. The paper develops this existentialist account in detail, illustrates it through a narrative example, and discusses how it reframes moral expansion in organizational ethics, with implications for future research and practice.