There is an increasing interest in how managers describe and respond to wha
t they regard as moral versus nonmoral problems in organizations. In this s
tudy, forty managers described a moral problem and a nonmoral problem that
they had encountered in their organization, each of which had been resolved
. Analyses indicated that: (1) the two types of problems could be significa
ntly differentiated using four of Jones' (1991) components of moral intensi
ty; (2) the labels managers used to describe problems varied systematically
between the two types of problems and according to the problem's moral int
ensity; and (3) problem management processes varied according to the proble
m's type and moral intensity.