An analysis of strategic and economic values of business ethics

Information technology ethics, information technology security, online user participation, and knowledge sharing in organisations have been recognised as substantial issues in the management information systems arena. However, for the most part, these topics have been researched separately. The objective of this study is to show the correlation between these topics. The authors found that the perception of information ethics is recognised differently from other ethics, such as sexual discrimination, racial discrimination, price discrimination, bribery, harmful products, telecommunication, pollution issues, and intellectual property protection issues. Furthermore, the authors showed that subjects such as security, knowledge absorption, knowledge transfer, and online user participation are related to one another. This means that a group that holds a different disposition from another group regarding one particular topic will also show a different disposition regarding another particular topic. For this research, the authors used the protection motivation theory, built a model that shows the relationship among several ethical issues and knowledge sharing, security and the participation in the virtual community, then verified it with a survey of 497 samples. We expect these findings will be helpful for future researchers and practitioners.