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Assessing Managers’ Ethical Decision-making: An Objective Measure of Managerial Moral Judgment

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  • Greg Loviscky
  • Linda Treviño
  • Rick Jacobs

Abstract

Recent allegations of unethical decision-making by leaders in prominent business organizations have jeopardized the world’s confidence in American business. The purpose of this research was to develop a measure of managerial moral judgment that can be used in future research and managerial assessment. The measure was patterned after the Defining Issues Test, a widely used general measure of moral judgment. With content validity as the goal, we aimed to sample the domain of managerial ethical situations by establishing links to dimensions of managerial performance, as well as to the types of organizational justice issues managers encounter. Proposed scenarios were evaluated for realism by ethics officers and human resource managers. Results indicated that the new measure is reliable and correlates with a number of relevant variables in the hypothesized manner, demonstrating evidence of construct validity. Implications for future research and for human resources management are discussed. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2007

Suggested Citation

  • Greg Loviscky & Linda Treviño & Rick Jacobs, 2007. "Assessing Managers’ Ethical Decision-making: An Objective Measure of Managerial Moral Judgment," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 73(3), pages 263-285, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:73:y:2007:i:3:p:263-285
    DOI: 10.1007/s10551-006-9206-2
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Greenberg, Jerald, 2002. "Who stole the money, and when? Individual and situational determinants of employee theft," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 89(1), pages 985-1003, September.
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    Cited by:

    1. Karin Lasthuizen & Kamal Badar, 2023. "Ethical Reasoning at Work: A Cross-Country Comparison of Gender and Age Differences," Administrative Sciences, MDPI, vol. 13(5), pages 1-16, May.
    2. Chris Perryer & Brenda Scott-Ladd, 2014. "Deceit, Misuse and Favours: Understanding and Measuring Attitudes to Ethics," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 121(1), pages 123-134, April.
    3. Yi-Hui Ho & Chieh-Yu Lin, 2016. "The Moral Judgment Relationship Between Leaders and Followers: A Comparative Study Across the Taiwan Strait," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 134(2), pages 299-310, March.
    4. Elaine Doyle & Jane Frecknall Hughes & Barbara Summers, 2013. "An Empirical Analysis of the Ethical Reasoning of Tax Practitioners," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 114(2), pages 325-339, May.
    5. Gregory Stevens & Jacqueline Deuling & Achilles Armenakis, 2012. "Successful Psychopaths: Are They Unethical Decision-Makers and Why?," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 105(2), pages 139-149, January.
    6. Suzanne Gils & Michael A. Hogg & Niels Quaquebeke & Daan Knippenberg, 2017. "When Organizational Identification Elicits Moral Decision-Making: A Matter of the Right Climate," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 142(1), pages 155-168, April.
    7. Rupp, Deborah E. & Shao, Ruodan & Jones, Kisha S. & Liao, Hui, 2014. "The utility of a multifoci approach to the study of organizational justice: A meta-analytic investigation into the consideration of normative rules, moral accountability, bandwidth-fidelity, and socia," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 123(2), pages 159-185.
    8. Edina Eberhardt-Toth & David Wasieleski, 2013. "A Cognitive Elaboration Model of Sustainability Decision Making: Investigating Financial Managers’ Orientation Toward Environmental Issues," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 117(4), pages 735-751, November.
    9. John Pearce, 2013. "Using Social Identity Theory to Predict Managers’ Emphases on Ethical and Legal Values in Judging Business Issues," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 112(3), pages 497-514, February.
    10. Peter E. Mudrack & E. Sharon Mason, 2022. "Vignette Themes and Moral Reasoning in Business Contexts: The Case for the Defining Issues Test," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 181(4), pages 979-995, December.
    11. van Gils, S. & van Quaquebeke, N. & van Knippenberg, D.L., 2011. "Tango in the Dark: The Interplay of Leader’s and Follower’s Level of Self-Construal and its Impact on Ethical Leadership," ERIM Report Series Research in Management ERS-2011-005-ORG, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

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