Building strong ethics and promoting positive character development: The influence of HRM at the United States Military Academy at West Point.

This article details the design and process of ethical and character development at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Based on a series of in-depth interviews coupled with a rigorous analysis of archival data, we challenge the presumption that military character development is a punitive and reactive activity. Rather, our results suggest that West Point uses a deliberate, intimate, and largely developmental approach to fulfill their mission of producing men and women of character who serve in the common defense. In particular, we found that West Point utilizes traditional human resource management functions of recruiting, selection, job rotation, and training to improve their character-development process. In addition to utilizing these traditional human resource functions, West Point also engages in more contemporary and strategic HR practices such as managing communication, promoting organizational learning, organizational design and development, and organizational socialization and culture shaping to enhance the character and integrity of its members. Accordingly, we feel that the West Point character-development approach can be utilized across settings to assist nonmilitary organizations to aspire and reach higher ethical standards. Finally, we argue that in addition to studying the ethics of HR research, scholars can look to understand how organizations can seek ethics through HR research. ©2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]