IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/jbuset/v142y2017i1d10.1007_s10551-015-2787-x.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Decreasing Unethical Decisions: The Role of Morality-Based Individual Differences

Author

Listed:
  • Rachel E. Sturm

    (Wright State University)

Abstract

Given the potential dangers of unethical decisions in the workplace, it has become increasingly important for managers to hire, and promote into leadership positions, those who are morally inclined. Behavioral ethics research has contributed to this effort by examining an array of individual difference variables (e.g., locus of control) that play a role in morality. However, past research has focused mostly on direct causal effects and not so much on the processes (including mediation) through which different factors, especially those that are morality based, decrease unethical choices. The purpose of the current research is to examine the process, which includes both subconscious and conscious decision pathways, through which moral attentiveness curbs unethical decision making at the individual level. The findings of a study employing about 200 participants and a cheating task reveal that both accurate ethical prototypes and moral awareness of the situation decreased unethical decisions, and moral attentiveness was found to be positively related to both of these constructs. In addition, having accurate ethical prototypes was found to be a partial mediator between perceptual moral attentiveness and less cheating, while moral awareness was found to be a partial mediator between reflective moral attentiveness and less cheating. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Rachel E. Sturm, 2017. "Decreasing Unethical Decisions: The Role of Morality-Based Individual Differences," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 142(1), pages 37-57, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:142:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s10551-015-2787-x
    DOI: 10.1007/s10551-015-2787-x
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-015-2787-x
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s10551-015-2787-x?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kurt Wurthmann, 2013. "A Social Cognitive Perspective on the Relationships Between Ethics Education, Moral Attentiveness, and PRESOR," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 114(1), pages 131-153, April.
    2. John Antonakis & Samuel Bendahan & Philippe Jacquart & Rafael Lalive, 2010. "On making causal claims : A review and recommendations," Post-Print hal-02313119, HAL.
    3. Jaana Woiceshyn, 2011. "A Model for Ethical Decision Making in Business: Reasoning, Intuition, and Rational Moral Principles," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 104(3), pages 311-323, December.
    4. Weaver, Gary R. & Treviño, Linda Klebe, 1999. "Compliance and Values Oriented Ethics Programs: Influenceson Employees’ Attitudes and Behavior," Business Ethics Quarterly, Cambridge University Press, vol. 9(2), pages 315-335, April.
    5. Craig VanSandt & Jon Shepard & Stephen Zappe, 2006. "An Examination of the Relationship Between Ethical Work Climate and Moral Awareness," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 68(4), pages 409-432, November.
    6. Scott Reynolds & Bradley Owens & Alex Rubenstein, 2012. "Moral Stress: Considering the Nature and Effects of Managerial Moral Uncertainty," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 106(4), pages 491-502, April.
    7. Bryant, Peter, 2009. "Self-regulation and moral awareness among entrepreneurs," Journal of Business Venturing, Elsevier, vol. 24(5), pages 505-518, September.
    8. Salvador, Rommel & Folger, Robert G., 2009. "Business Ethics and the Brain: Rommel Salvador and Robert G. Folger," Business Ethics Quarterly, Cambridge University Press, vol. 19(1), pages 1-31, January.
    9. Jennifer Jordan, 2009. "A Social Cognition Framework for Examining Moral Awareness in Managers and Academics," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 84(2), pages 237-258, January.
    10. Daniel Zizzo, 2010. "Experimenter demand effects in economic experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 13(1), pages 75-98, March.
    11. Gino, Francesca & Schweitzer, Maurice E. & Mead, Nicole L. & Ariely, Dan, 2011. "Unable to resist temptation: How self-control depletion promotes unethical behavior," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 115(2), pages 191-203, July.
    12. Brian Whitaker & Lindsey Godwin, 2013. "The Antecedents of Moral Imagination in the Workplace: A Social Cognitive Theory Perspective," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 114(1), pages 61-73, April.
    13. Dawn Elm & Tara Radin, 2012. "Ethical Decision Making: Special or No Different?," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 107(3), pages 313-329, May.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hina Shahid & Shafaq Arif Chaudhry & Furrakh Abbas & Saira Ghulam Hassan & Shoaib Aslam, 2023. "Do Morality-Based Individual Differences and Relational Climates Matter? Ethical Leadership and Knowledge Hiding: A Multilevel Framework," SAGE Open, , vol. 13(4), pages 21582440231, December.
    2. Kirsten Cowan & Atefeh Yazdanparast, 2021. "Consequences of Moral Transgressions: How Regulatory Focus Orientation Motivates or Hinders Moral Decoupling," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 170(1), pages 115-132, April.
    3. Kubilay Gok & John J. Sumanth & William H. Bommer & Ozgur Demirtas & Aykut Arslan & Jared Eberhard & Ali Ihsan Ozdemir & Ahmet Yigit, 2017. "You May Not Reap What You Sow: How Employees’ Moral Awareness Minimizes Ethical Leadership’s Positive Impact on Workplace Deviance," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 146(2), pages 257-277, December.
    4. LaJuan Perronoski Fuller, 2021. "Foundational Leadership Theory: A New Ethical Approach to Reducing Knowledge-Hiding Practices Among Employees," International Journal of Social Science Studies, Redfame publishing, vol. 9(5), pages 67-76, September.
    5. Janie Bérubé & Yves Gendron, 2023. "Developing Ethical Sensitivity in Future Accounting Practitioners: The Case of a Dialogic Learning for Final-Year Undergraduates," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 183(3), pages 763-781, March.
    6. Yu-Shan Huang & Shuqin Wei & Tyson Ang, 2022. "The Role of Customer Perceived Ethicality in Explaining the Impact of Incivility Among Employees on Customer Unethical Behavior and Customer Citizenship Behavior," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 178(2), pages 519-535, June.
    7. Chenghao Men & Patrick S. W. Fong & Weiwei Huo & Jing Zhong & Ruiqian Jia & Jinlian Luo, 2020. "Ethical Leadership and Knowledge Hiding: A Moderated Mediation Model of Psychological Safety and Mastery Climate," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 166(3), pages 461-472, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. David Dawson, 2018. "Organisational Virtue, Moral Attentiveness, and the Perceived Role of Ethics and Social Responsibility in Business: The Case of UK HR Practitioners," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 148(4), pages 765-781, April.
    2. Mark S. Schwartz, 2016. "Ethical Decision-Making Theory: An Integrated Approach," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 139(4), pages 755-776, December.
    3. Lamberto Zollo & Massimiliano Matteo Pellegrini & Cristiano Ciappei, 2017. "What Sparks Ethical Decision Making? The Interplay Between Moral Intuition and Moral Reasoning: Lessons from the Scholastic Doctrine," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 145(4), pages 681-700, November.
    4. David Dawson, 2018. "Measuring Individuals’ Virtues in Business," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 147(4), pages 793-805, February.
    5. Jihyeon Kim & Jeffrey Loewenstein, 2021. "Analogical Encoding Fosters Ethical Decision Making Because Improved Knowledge of Ethical Principles Increases Moral Awareness," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 172(2), pages 307-324, August.
    6. Theodorakis, Ioannis G. & Painesis, Grigorios, 2022. "Ad eroticism from a psychological distance perspective: Investigating its effects in light of consumers’ sex, ethical judgments, and moral attentiveness," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 142(C), pages 524-539.
    7. Dickinson, David L. & Masclet, David, 2023. "Unethical decision making and sleep restriction: Experimental evidence," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 141(C), pages 484-502.
    8. Sebastian Goebel & Barbara E. Weißenberger, 2017. "The Relationship Between Informal Controls, Ethical Work Climates, and Organizational Performance," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 141(3), pages 505-528, March.
    9. Hardin, Ashley E. & Bauman, Christopher W. & Mayer, David M., 2020. "Show me the … family: How photos of meaningful relationships reduce unethical behavior at work," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 161(C), pages 93-108.
    10. Giurge, Laura M. & Van Dijke, Marius & Zheng, Michelle Xue & De Cremer, David, 2021. "Does power corrupt the mind? The influence of power on moral reasoning and self-interested behavior," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 115322, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    11. Jen-Sheng Liao & Charles S. Chien, 2017. "The Eight-Consciousness Model of Ethical Decision Making," Review of Social Sciences, LAR Center Press, vol. 2(9), pages 1-10, September.
    12. John Antonakis & Giovanna d’Adda & Roberto A. Weber & Christian Zehnder, 2022. "“Just Words? Just Speeches?” On the Economic Value of Charismatic Leadership," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(9), pages 6355-6381, September.
    13. Lynn Godkin, 2015. "Mid-Management, Employee Engagement, and the Generation of Reliable Sustainable Corporate Social Responsibility," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 130(1), pages 15-28, August.
    14. Chavez, Daniel E. & Palma, Marco A. & Nayga, Rodolfo M. & Mjelde, James W., 2020. "Product availability in discrete choice experiments with private goods," Journal of choice modelling, Elsevier, vol. 36(C).
    15. Maja Adena & Julian Harke, 2022. "COVID-19 and pro-sociality: How do donors respond to local pandemic severity, increased salience, and media coverage?," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 25(3), pages 824-844, June.
    16. Kessel, Dany & Mollerstrom, Johanna & van Veldhuizen, Roel, 2021. "Can simple advice eliminate the gender gap in willingness to compete?," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 138, pages 1-1.
    17. Andrea F.M. Martinangeli & Lisa Windsteiger, 2019. "Immigration vs. Poverty: Causal Impact on Demand for Redistribution in a Survey Experiment," Working Papers tax-mpg-rps-2019-13, Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance.
    18. Yidong Tu & Xinxin Lu & Yue Yu, 2017. "Supervisors’ Ethical Leadership and Employee Job Satisfaction: A Social Cognitive Perspective," Journal of Happiness Studies, Springer, vol. 18(1), pages 229-245, February.
    19. Barrera, Oscar & Guriev, Sergei & Henry, Emeric & Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina, 2020. "Facts, alternative facts, and fact checking in times of post-truth politics," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 182(C).
    20. Mahadzirah Mohamad & Asyraf Afthanorhan* & Zainudin Awang & Morliyati Mohammad, 2019. "Comparison Between CB-SEM and PLS-SEM: Testing and Confirming the Maqasid Syariah Quality of Life Measurement Model," The Journal of Social Sciences Research, Academic Research Publishing Group, vol. 5(3), pages 608-614, 03-2019.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:142:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s10551-015-2787-x. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.