Research on behavioral ethics is thriving and intends to offer advice that can be used by practitioners to improve the practice of ethics management. However, three barriers prevent this research from generating genuinely useful advice. It does not sufficiently focus on interventions that can be directly designed by management. The typical research designs used in behavioral ethics research require such a reduction of complexity that the resulting findings are not very useful for practitioners. Worse still, attempts to make behavioral ethics research more useful by formulating simple recommendations are potentially very damaging. In response to these limitations, this article proposes to complement the current behavioral ethics research agenda that takes an ‘explanatory science’ approach with a research agenda that uses a ‘design science’ approach. Proposed by Joan van Aken and building on earlier work by Herbert Simon, this approach aims to develop field-tested ‘design propositions’ that present often complex but useful recommendations for practitioners. Using a ‘CIMO-logic’, these propositions specify how an ‘intervention’ can generate very different ‘outcomes’ through various ‘mechanisms’, depending on the ‘context’. An illustration and a discussion of the contours of this new research agenda for ethics management demonstrate its advantages as well as its feasibility. The article concludes with a reflection on the feasibility of embracing complexity without drowning in a sea of complicated contingencies and without being paralyzed by the awareness that all interventions can have both desirable and undesirable effects.

行为伦理学的研究正在蓬勃发展，旨在提供可供从业者用来改进伦理管理实践的建议。然而，三个障碍阻止这项研究产生真正有用的建议。它没有充分关注可以由管理层直接设计的干预措施。行为伦理研究中使用的典型研究设计需要降低复杂性，结果结果对从业者不是很有用。更糟糕的是，通过制定简单的建议来使行为伦理研究更有用的尝试可能会非常具有破坏性。针对这些局限性，本文建议对当前采用“解释性科学”方法的行为伦理学研究议程与采用“设计科学”方法的研究议程进行补充。这种方法由 Joan van Aken 提出并以 Herbert Simon 的早期工作为基础，旨在开发经过现场测试的“设计命题”，为从业者提供通常复杂但有用的建议。使用“CIMO 逻辑”，这些命题指定了“干预”如何通过各种“机制”产生非常不同的“结果”，具体取决于“上下文”。对这一新的伦理管理研究议程的轮廓的说明和讨论证明了它的优势和可行性。文章最后反思了接受复杂性的可行性，而不会淹没在复杂的突发事件的海洋中，也不会因为意识到所有干预措施都可能产生理想和不良影响而陷入瘫痪。