Career clinics as ethical infrastructures for sustainable organizational culture

Whether organizations' ethical and sustainability commitments carry weight in appraisal, promotion and succession depends on how career decisions are governed. Incorporating ethical criteria into such decisions raises a governance problem: candid reflection on dilemmas and mistakes may be inhibited if disclosures can affect careers, whereas career-consequential criteria require ethical conduct to be assessed. This conceptual article develops Career Clinics, a governance arrangement configuring three components: a recurring, ethics-focused developmental practice protected from individual career assessment; independently evidenced ethical conduct entering at least one promotion or succession rule, directly or through formally linked appraisal; and aggregated, de-identified developmental patterns informing governance of those criteria. Each component has established partial antecedents, including split developmental and evaluative appraisal, ethics-oriented performance appraisal and confidential, primarily developmental professional appraisal with anonymized thematic feedback. A structured, non-exhaustive literature search also identified organizational and professional arrangements combining partial features of two or three components. The configuration is therefore offered as a candidate contribution within the literature reviewed, not as a claim of priority. The theoretical contribution is twofold: the article extends ethical-infrastructure research toward governing career decision criteria, drawing on selective-coupling research, and specifies four defining thresholds, a two-channel architecture separating protected development from independent assessment, propositions specifying enabling conditions, mechanisms and moderators, and failure mechanisms and boundary conditions. Consistently applied criteria are proposed to help sustain ethical practices by aligning stated commitments with the signals sent by who advances. The framework has not been empirically validated; indicators and research designs for testing it are proposed.