Previous studies have found Forsyth’s Ethical Position Questionnaire (EPQ) to vary between countries, but none has made a systematic evaluation of its psychometric properties across consumers from many countries. Using confirmatory factor analysis and multi-group LISREL analysis, this paper explores the factor structure of the EPQ and the measurement equivalence in five societies: Austria, Britain, Brunei, Hong Kong and USA. The results suggest that the modified scale, measuring idealism and relativism, was applicable in all five societies. Equivalence was found across (...) Britain, Brunei and USA, but the original scale cannot be used validly. (shrink)

Finance is an area that, in practice, is plagued by accusations of unethical activity; the study of finance had adopted a largely nonbehavioral approach to business ethics research. We address this gap in by assessing whether individual ethical orientations predict the acceptability of questionable decisions about financial issues. Results show that individual ethical orientations are associated with different levels of acceptability of questionable decisions about financial issues, though the pattern of these differences varies across individual ethical orientations assessed. These results (...) represent evidence that ethical individual differences are associated with the acceptability of questionable finance decisions and are discussed in terms of methodological limitations and future directions in finance ethics research. (shrink)

We propose a three-way interaction model based on substitutes for leadership theory to explore the relationship among ethical leadership, moral personality, and moral ideology on two types of employee voluntary behaviors. Results from a sample of 218 supervisor–subordinate dyads indicate that moral personality attenuates the relationship between ethical leadership and employee voluntary behaviors. Idealism serves as the boundary condition for the moderating effect of moral personality. However, relativism only serves as the boundary condition for the moderating effect of moral personality (...) when predicting workplace deviant behavior. (shrink)

Research on the antecedents of consumers’ ethical beliefs has mainly examined cognitive variables and has neglected the relationships among affective variables and consumer ethics. However, research in moral psychology indicates that moral emotions have a significant role in ethical decision-making. Thus, the ability to experience, perceive and regulate emotions should influence consumers’ ethical decision-making. These abilities, which are components of emotional intelligence, are examined as antecedents to consumers’ ethical beliefs in this study. Five hundred Australian consumers participated in this study (...) by completing an online questionnaire that included measures of emotional intelligence, consumers’ ethical beliefs and personal moral philosophies. Results demonstrate that the ability to appraise and express emotions in oneself is directly negatively related to beliefs regarding actively benefiting from illegal actions as a consumer, passively benefiting at the expense of the seller and actively benefiting from questionable but legal actions as a consumer. The ability to appraise and express emotions in oneself is directly positively related to beliefs regarding ‘doing-good’ actions. The ability to appraise and recognise emotions in others is also directly positively related to beliefs regarding ‘doing-good’ actions as well as pro-environmental buying actions. The effects of the different components of emotional intelligence on consumers’ ethical beliefs are mediated by personal moral philosophies. This study demonstrates the relationship between emotional intelligence and consumer ethics and highlights the interplay of affect and cognition in consumers’ ethical decision-making. (shrink)

Differences in ethical ideology are thought to influence individuals'' reasoning about moral issues (Forsyth and Nye, 1990; Forsyth, 1992). To date, relatively little research has addressed this proposition in terms of business-related ethical issues. In the present study, four groups, representing four distinct ethical ideologies, were created based on the two dimensions of the Ethical Position Questionnaire (idealism and relativism), as posited by Forsyth (1980). The ethical judgments of individuals regarding several business-related issues varied, depending upon their ethical ideology.

The present study extends the study of individuals' ethical ideology withinthe context of marketing ethics issues. A national sample of marketing professionals participated. Respondents' ethical ideologies were classified as absolutists, situationists, exceptionists, or subjectivists using the Ethical Position Questionnaire (Forsyth, 1980). Respondents then answered questions about three ethically ambiguous situations common to marketing and sales. The results indicated that marketers' ethical judgments about the situations differed based on their ethical ideology, with absolutists rating the actions as most unethical. The findings (...) are consistent with those of two earlier studies that utilized samples of business students (Barnett et al., 1994, 1995). The results suggest that personal moral philosophy is an important influence on ethical decision making that should be considered in empirical studies of business ethics. The results also support the utility of the Ethical Position Questionnaire (Forsyth, 1980) as a means for researchers and practitioners to assess individuals' ethical ideology. (shrink)

As international trade and business opportunities grow globally, insight into trading partners’ strategies is essential. One of the major strategies that impact trading partners’ relationships is negotiation strategy employed by each partner. These strategies assume even greater importance when these strategies have ethical content. This study examines the effects of marketing executives’ preferred ethical ideologies, opportunism and Machiavellianism on their perceived appropriateness of unethical negotiation tactics. Utilizing a sample of 995 marketing executives from six countries, cluster analysis and multivariate analysis (...) of variance revealed two types of marketing negotiators: principled and corrupt negotiators. Corrupt negotiators tend to be more Machiavellian, more relativist, more opportunistic and less idealistic than their principled counterparts. Principled negotiators tend to perceive unethical negotiation tactics less favorably than their corrupt counterparts. Implications of these results for practitioners and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them. More precisely, ‘relativism’ covers views which maintain that—at a level of high abstraction—at least some class of things have properties they have not simpliciter, but only relative to a given framework of assessment, and correspondingly, that the truth of (...) claims attributing these properties holds only once the relevant framework of assessment is specified or supplied. Relativists characteristically insist, furthermore, that if something is only relatively so, then there can be no framework-independent vantage point from which the matter of whether the thing in question is so can be established. Relativism has been, in its various guises, both one of the most popular and most reviled philosophical doctrines of our time. Defenders see it as a harbinger of tolerance and the only ethical and epistemic stance worthy of the open-minded and tolerant. Detractors dismiss it for its alleged incoherence and uncritical intellectual permissiveness. Debates about relativism permeate the whole spectrum of philosophical sub-disciplines. From ethics to epistemology, science to religion, political theory to ontology, theories of meaning and even logic, philosophy has felt the need to respond to this heady and seemingly subversive idea. Discussions of relativism often also invoke considerations relevant to the very nature and methodology of philosophy and to the division between the so-called ‘analytic and continental’ camps in philosophy. And yet, despite a long history of debate going back to Plato and a still developing large body of writing, it is still difficult to come to an agreed definition of what, at its core, relativism is, and what philosophical import it has. This entry attempts to provide a broad account of the many ways in which ‘relativism’ has been defined, explained, defended and criticized. (shrink)

The relation between religious and moral thought has been difficult to unravel because of the multifaceted nature of both religion and morality. We chose to study the belief dimension of religion and the meta-ethics dimension of morality and investigated the relation between God-related thoughts and objectivist/subjectivist morality in three studies. We expected a reciprocal relation between the idea of God and objective morality since God is one prominent way through which objective moral truths could be grounded and thus the lack (...) of such objective truths might imply the absence of God who could set such truths. Study 1 revealed negative correlations between moral subjectivism and several measures of religious belief. Study 2 showed that people adopt moral objectivism more and moral subjectivism less after being implicitly primed with religious words in a sentence unscrambling task. Study 3 showed that people express less confidence about the existence of God after reading a persuasive text about the subjective nature of moral truths. Taken together, the results demonstrate that religious and meta-ethical beliefs are indeed related and can reciprocally influence each other. (shrink)