This review summarizes the research on ethical decision-making from 2004 to 2011. Eighty-four articles were published during this period, resulting in 357 findings. Individual findings are categorized by their application to individual variables, organizational variables, or the concept of moral intensity as developed by Jones :366–395, 1991). Rest’s four-step model for ethical decision-making is used to summarize findings by dependent variable—awareness, intent, judgment, and behavior. A discussion of findings in each category is provided in order to uncover trends in the (...) ethical decision-making literature. A summary of areas of suggested future research is provided. (shrink)

The value of a company’s ethical reputation has become a focal point for management researchers. We seek to join this conversation and extend the research centered on a firm’s ethical reputation. We accomplish this by shifting our focus away from its impact on external stakeholders to its impact on internal stakeholders. To this end, we rely on signaling theory to explain why a firm’s ethical reputation matters to its employees in an effort to bridge the macro–micro research gap. Across two (...) studies, we propose and demonstrate that a firm’s ethical reputation impacts employee subjective career success in form of career opportunities and work–life balance. Given our signaling theory framework, we also identify and explain when two industry-level characteristics operate as boundary conditions that distort a firm’s ethical reputation signaling properties. Specifically, the results demonstrate that a firm’s ethical reputation is positively related to employees’ perceptions of career opportunities and work–life balance. The results of our studies also demonstrate that the relatively high levels of industry competition and industry regulation weaken the positive impact of a firm’s ethical reputation on career opportunities and work–life balance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to point out the importance of having an ethics-related course for human resource development (HRD) graduate programs; and second, to highlight HRD potential to minimize ethical misconduct through an ethical filter in organizations. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is conceptual in nature. The authors used their own experiences in HRD programs, looked at HRD graduate programs’ curricula in different universities, and reviewed the literature on ethics and HRD to develop a conceptual (...) model. The model is to guide future studies and identify the role of HRD practices to create an ethical climate in organizations. Findings – In this paper, the authors illustrate the connection between HRD practices and ethical climate in organizations by providing a conceptual framework. In the concluding paragraphs, the authors provide a discussion, implications, and recommendations for future studies. Originality/value – The authors highlight the limited research conducted on how ethics and ethical dilemmas need to be represented in HRD practitioners’ activities and practices. Many graduate-level HRD students do not receive enough training on ethics, whereas it is their responsibility to help improve organizational ethical climate and educate and prepare human resources to minimize ethical misconducts and wrongdoings. The paper provides a framework for HRD practitioners to create a strong ethical climate in their organizations. (shrink)

Workplace incivility is a current challenge in organizations, including smaller firms, as is the development of programs that enhance employees’ treatment of coworkers and ethical decision making. Ethics programs in particular might attenuate tendencies toward interpersonal misconduct, which can harm ethical reasoning. Consequently, this study evaluated the relationships among the presence of ethics codes and employees’ locus of control, social aversion/malevolence, and ethical judgments of incivility using information secured from a sample of businesspersons employed in smaller organizations. Results indicated that (...) ethics code presence was associated with a more internal locus of control and stronger ethical judgment of workplace incivility. Social aversion/malevolence was negatively related to ethical judgment, and internal locus of control was positively related to ethical judgment. Smaller firms should develop ethics codes to manage individuals’ perceptions of control, thus encouraging enhanced ethical reasoning in situations that involve the mistreatment of coworkers; they should also monitor counterproductive tendencies that harm such reasoning and precipitate incivility. (shrink)

What does it look like when an organization tentatively steps away from an exclusively rules-based regime and begins to attend to both rules and principles? What insights and guidance can ethicists and ethical theory offer? This paper is a case study of an organization that has initiated such a transition. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants has begun a turn toward the promotion of ethical principles and best practices by adding a “conceptual framework” to its existing Code of Professional (...) Conduct. This conceptual framework calls upon its members to intentionally increase their awareness of significant threats to their compliance with its rules of conduct and to establish safeguards to offset or eliminate those threats. To this end, each member is required to regard every questionable situation, circumstance, transaction or relationship by attempting to view it through the eyes of an imagined reasonable third party. This paper examines this protocol theoretically and practically. First, we frame this analysis within the principles and ethical concepts that inform the professional ethics of accountants. Second, we critique the AICPA’s long-standing rules-based approach to its Code. Third, we examine the new conceptual framework with a view toward its potential for the promotion of a more principles-based approach to the professional ethics of the accounting profession. Fourth, we give attention to the notion of the “reasonable and informed third party,” which has been embedded in the new conceptual framework, and consider how two schools of thought—Adam Smith’s modernist “impartial spectator” concept and Emmanuel Lévinas’ postmodern phenomenology in regard to “the Other”—may offer theoretical support and clarity for this epistemic exercise. Finally, we point out several ways in which the AICPA’s commitment to its new conceptual framework could be strengthened and enhanced. (shrink)

Business ethics is one of the most significant demands made by institutional and individual investors, who usually require the participation of the board of directors in the planning and implementation of ethical behaviour in corporations. This is done by drawing up an ethics code and then monitoring its fulfilment. This study has a dual objective: first, to analyse the role played by the composition of the board of directors, and by that we mean its independence and the diversity of its (...) members, on the implementation and scope of an EC, and, second, to detect whether the corporate governance system moderates the level of involvement of the board in ethical issues. The findings obtained from a data panel sample made up of 760 listed companies from 12 countries for the years 2003–2009 show that the largest companies with large-sized and diverse boards implement the most developed ECs. Nevertheless, the extent of involvement of the independent directors is conditioned by the level of shareholder orientation characteristic of the system of CG in the corporation’s country of origin. (shrink)

This study examines how organizations may embed humanizing narrative devices and related activities in their management control systems to enact humanizing business practices. As defined here, narrative devices include complete stories as well as story fragments that may under certain circumstances invoke a shared narrative context. Humanizing narrative devices respect a person’s dignity and capacity for personal growth, respect human rights, promote care and service for others, and improve an organization’s ability to serve the common good rather than only narrow (...) special interests. The first section discusses the sense-making and action-guiding properties of narrative devices, and then discusses principles for applying them in a manner that respects others in a diverse workplace. The second section adapts Simons’ management accounting and control framework to trace interdependencies among an organization’s narrative devices and related activities. The third section applies the combined narrative devices and systems framework to illustrate how an actual company has articulated, debated, revised, and enacted its core values over time. The concluding section discusses the analysis, its contributions to the literature, and implications for future research. (shrink)

This study investigates the association of a broad set of variables with the ethical decision making of management accountants in Libya. Adopting a cross-sectional methodology, a questionnaire including four different ethical scenarios was used to gather data from 229 participants. For each scenario, ethical decision making was examined in terms of the recognition, judgment and intention stages of Rest’s model. A significant relationship was found between ethical recognition and ethical judgment and also between ethical judgment and ethical intention, but ethical (...) recognition did not significantly predict ethical intention—thus providing support for Rest’s model. Organizational variables, age and educational level yielded few significant results. The lack of significance for codes of ethics might reflect their relative lack of development in Libya, in which case Libyan companies should pay attention to their content and how they are supported, especially in the light of the under-development of the accounting profession in Libya. Few significant results were also found for gender, but where they were found, males showed more ethical characteristics than females. This unusual result reinforces the dangers of gender stereotyping in business. Personal moral philosophy and moral intensity dimensions were generally found to be significant predictors of the three stages of ethical decision making studied. One implication of this is to give more attention to ethics in accounting education, making the connections between accounting practice and Islam. Overall, this study not only adds to the available empirical evidence on factors affecting ethical decision making, notably examining three stages of Rest’s model, but also offers rare insights into the ethical views of practising management accountants and provides a benchmark for future studies of ethical decision making in Muslim majority countries and other parts of the developing world. (shrink)

This study examines the effects of individual ethical values and organizational factors on the professional ethics of PR practitioners in Korea by considering a person–situation interactionist model. Individual ethical values are used as individual factors, and organizational factors consist of an organization’s reward and punishment for ethical/unethical behavior, the behavior of peers, and the ethical integrity of the chief ethics officer. The professional ethics of PR practitioners (the dependent variable) are classified into the following three dimensions: professional ethics for the (...) public, the client, and the PR industry. The results indicate that agency practitioners were more likely to be committed to their profession than to their organization, whereas in-house practitioners were more likely to be committed to their organization than to their profession. That is, in-house practitioners showed weak professional commitment, indicating that they perceived themselves as employees, not as PR professionals. Organizational factors such as reward, punishment, and peers’ ethical behavior had considerable influence on the professional ethics of in-house practitioners, whereas they had little influence on agency practitioners. Organizational factors as well as individual ethical values were more likely to influence the professional ethics of in-house practitioners than that of agency practitioners. Thus, to foster in-house practitioners’ professional ethics and commitment, professional associations in the PR industry should make efforts to provide in-house practitioners with more information on the PR industry and more opportunities for interacting and maintaining communication with their colleagues in the industry. (shrink)

This research updates and significantly extends Akaah and Riordon’s (J Market Res 26:112–120, 1989 ) evaluation of ethical perceptions of marketing research misconduct among marketing research professionals. In addition to examining changes in perceptions toward key marketing research practices over time, we assess professionals’ judgments on the ethicality, importance, and occurrence of a variety of new marketing research ethics situations in both online and offline contexts. In a second study, we assess ethical judgments of the public at large using a (...) representative sample of US consumers—key stakeholders ignored in prior research on unethical marketing research practices. Generally speaking, disapproval of unethical research conduct has grown across the board in the last 20 years for both managers and marketing researchers. The same misconduct elicits a stronger disapproval in the online environment compared to the offline environment. Compared to marketing researchers, managers tend to think that unethical research conduct occurs more frequently. Those who conduct marketing research or use its findings (i.e., marketing researchers and managers) are less tolerant of unethical research conduct than the general public. (shrink)

This paper presents a review of 100 empirical papers studying corporate codes of ethics in business organizations from the time period mid-2005 until mid-2016, following approximately an 11-year time period after the previous review of the literature. The reviewed papers are broadly categorized as content-oriented, output-oriented, or transformation-oriented. The review sheds light on empirical focus, context, questions addressed, methods, findings and theory. The findings are discussed in terms of the three categories as well as the aggregate, stock of empirical CCE (...) studies in comparison with previous reviews, answering the question “where are we now?” Content and output studies still stand for the majority of the studies, whereas the transformation studies are fewer. Within these areas, two new trends are found to have emerged: discursive analyses and a focus on labor conditions. The review finds that the content of CCEs is still predominantly self-defensive, that CCEs are insufficient in themselves in terms of protecting workers’ rights, that CCEs are likely to encounter tensions when implemented across national and organizational boundaries, and that while perception of CCEs is generally positive, CCEs may lead to both positive and negative outcomes. Based on these findings, potential areas for further exploration in the area of CCE research are suggested. (shrink)

Using a sample of multinational firms in Germany, we develop and empirically examine a model to test the effects of ethical climate and its antecedents on purchasing social responsibility (PSR). Our results show different effects of benevolence dimensions of ethical climate on PSR: employee-focused climate has no effect, but community-focused climate is a significant driver of PSR. The results also show that top management ethical norms and code of conduct implementation impact PSR directly as well as indirectly through ethical climate.

Occupational fraud frequently involves the direct or indirect participation of professional accountants. To reduce fraud, companies often focus on the incentive/pressure and opportunity legs of the fraud triangle, perhaps believing that rationalization is beyond their control. We argue that rationalization reduction is necessary to minimize occupational fraud. We propose that educators and PA consider incorporating fences as controls to reduce rationalization. Because they focus on compliance and risk avoidance and are non-negotiable, fences appeal to accountant’s Myers Briggs personalities and conventional (...) level of moral development. Educators can teach students about the fences used in practice, and explain how they help new professionals resist pressures and temptations. By adding fences to existing professional guidance, accountants can reduce the likelihood that they will be a party to fraud. (shrink)

After the USSR collapsed, the Russian economy underwent serious changes from being plan-based to a market economy. These changes, together with political instability, created a business environment where no attention was paid to ethics. Russian managers have little experience operating in a market economy, which created many misunderstandings with foreign partners, especially regarding ethical issues of doing business. This study examined the factors influencing the ethical judgments of Russian employees to understand how they perceive ethical issues and make ethical or (...) unethical decisions at work. The Ferrell and Gresham framework was employed in this study to understand the process of making ethical decision by an individual. Transparency was proposed as a moderator of the relationship between opportunity factors and employees’ ethical judgments. Findings of this study show that Russian employees tend to be more tolerant towards ethically questionable behaviors at a workplace. Moreover, the results also demonstrate that transparency moderates the influence of opportunity to behave unethically on ethical judgments. (shrink)