The impact of person-organization ethics fit on ethical performance of autonomous vehicles

ABSTRACT The autonomous vehicles (AVs) operate in a challenging environment and must uphold ethical principles. As a result, ensuring strong ethical performance, defined as adherence to prescribed ethics requirements, is essential for AV development. Designers, developers, and testers play critical roles in this process and largely determine the ethical performance of AVs. However, members of such AV development teams may hold different ethical views or differ in their level of agreement with the ethics requirements for AVs. The correspondence between the ethics of individuals in development and ethics requirements for AVs can be regarded as person-organization (P-O) ethics fit. This study investigates the following research question: How does the person-organization (P-O) ethics fit influence the ethical performance of AVs? Based on a comprehensive literature review and relevant theoretical frameworks, we developed a research model and proposed ten hypotheses. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was applied to test the proposed model and hypotheses. The results showed that P-O ethics fit positively influences the ethical performance of AVs through work-related attitudes, motivation, and organizational citizenship behaviors. Finally, the limitations, theoretical contributions, and practical implications of this study were discussed, along with directions for future research.