On the role of unethical organizational culture in managerial decision-making

The managerial decision-making is being discussed in management literature from an ethical standpoint for more than thirty years already. However, increased attention to this phenomenon was aroused in both the business and in public just a couple of years ago along with the ethical scandals of once successful global corporations and the economic crisis at the end of the first decade of new millennium. Downturn, and eventually also liquidations of companies like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, Andersen, or Parmalat were triggered by ethical failures of top managers and as such they definitely refuted negativistic attitudes of the ethical sceptics toward the role of ethics in business. Practitioners and academics started to intensely discuss, how to manage and minimize the risk of managerial unethical decision-making. Because the unethical decisions of managers could be costly both financially and morally, this study has focused on the organization-bound reasons of why managers decide for an unethical action. We were interested especially in the role of the unethical organizational culture in managerial decision-making and in its capacity to drive wrongful managerial decisions.