An Exploration of Ethical Decision-making Processes in the United States and Egypt

In this comparative survey of 191 Egyptian and 92 U.S. executives, we explore the relationship between national culture and ethical decision-making within the context of business. Using Reidenbach and Robin’s (1988) multi-criteria ethics instrument, we examine how differences on two of Hofstede’s national culture dimensions, individualism/collectivism, and power distance, are related to the manner in which business practitioners make ethical decisions. Egypt and the U.S. provide an interesting comparison because of the extreme differences in their economies and related business development. Our results indicate that respondents from the U.S, individualistic and low in power distance, were likely to view the decision making outcome in ethics scenarios as more unethical than the more collectivistic and high power distance Egyptians, when applying ethical criteria based on justice, utilitarianism, relativism, and (contrary to our predictions) egoism. However, we also found that both Egyptians and Americans rely on justice, utilitarianism, and relativism in predicting their intentions to behave ethically, and that Americans substitute egoism for justice, when the behavioral intentions of peers are examined.     

Mixed Motives and Ethical Decisions in Business

Discerning the motives that lead businesspeople to make ethical decisions in economic contexts is important, for it aids the moral evaluation of such decisions. But conventional economic theory has for too long assumed an egoist model of motivation, to which many contrast an altruist view of ethical choices. The result is to see business decision making as implying dilemmas. On the other hand, we argue, if one assumes multiple motives, economic and ethical, in ordinary business decisions, a more fruitful model of ethical motivation in such decisions emerges. In this paper multiple motives are assumed to be the norm in a world of large organizations, complex decisions and stakeholder management. An example of a technology acquisition decision, with environmental overtones is presented in illustration of this approach. A method for discerning motives, primarily in terms of behavioural efficacy is presented. On this basis a two step approach to morally evaluating mixed motives in business decisions is proposed. First, the fit of motives with substantive ethical values should be ascertained, and then the efficacy of moral motives in yielding ethical behaviour and outcomes should be determined. This approach, we conclude, offers a much more concrete model of the actual role of moral motives in business decision making. It also signals the importance of moral learning in organizations.     

The Link Between Management Behavior and Ethical Philosophy in the Wake of the Enron Convictions

The current linkages between ethical theory and management behavior are investigated in the wake of the much-publicized convictions of Enron executives. The vignettes used in this investigation represent ethical dilemmas in the areas of coercion and control, conflict of interest, physical environment, and personal integrity. Since 2003, and after the successful prosecution of Enron executives, the link between ethical philosophy and management behavior has shifted somewhat dramatically. There has been a significant change in the rational basis for managerial decision making. In 2003, even after the Enron scandal was publicized, practitioners still relied heavily on both act and rule utilitarian ethical philosophies when making business decisions. Currently, the majority of respondents are likely to select ethically appropriate actions based on either rule utilitarian or rights rationales. It appears that ethical behavior is now more in line with ethical rhetoric, which may positively impact the ethical climate of business decision making. Apparently, business scandals of the past did not really impact actual ethical behavior much, but the high-profile prosecutions, convictions, and jail sentences may have impressed on managers that now is the time to incorporate ethics into business decisions.     

Religious Intensity,Evangelical Christianity,and Business Ethics: An Empirical Study

Research on the relationship between religious commitment and business ethics has produced widely varying results and made the impact of such commitment unclear. This study presents an empirical investigation based on a questionnaire survey of business managers and professionals in the United States yielding a database of 1234 respondents. Respondents evaluated the ethical acceptability of 16 business decisions. Findings varied with the way in which the religion variable was measured. Little relationship between religious commitment and ethical judgment was found when responses were compared on the basis of broad faith categories – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, other religions, and no religion. However, respondents who indicated that religious interests were of high or moderate importance to them demonstrated a higher level of ethical judgment (less accepting of unethical decisions) than others in their evaluations. Evangelical Christians also showed a higher level of ethical judgment.     

A Model for Ethical Decision Making in Business: Reasoning, Intuition, and Rational Moral Principles

How do business leaders make ethical decisions? Given the significant and wide-spread impact of business people??s decisions on multiple constituents (e.g., customers, employees, shareholders, competitors, and suppliers), how they make decisions matters. Unethical decisions harm the decision makers themselves as well as others, whereas ethical decisions have the opposite effect. Based on data from a study on strategic decision making by 16 effective chief executive officers (and three not-so-effective ones as contrast), I propose a model for ethical decision making in business in which reasoning (conscious processing) and intuition (subconscious processing) interact through forming, recalling, and applying moral principles necessary for long-term success in business. Following the CEOs in the study, I employ a relatively new theory, rational egoism, as the substantive content of the model and argue it to be consistent with the requirements of long-term business success. Besides explaining the processes of forming and applying principles (integration by essentials and spiraling), I briefly describe rational egoism and illustrate the model with a contemporary moral dilemma of downsizing. I conclude with implications for further research and ethical decision making in business.     

Effects of justice and utilitarianism on ethical decision making: a cross‐cultural examination of gender similarities and differences

This study investigates the relationship between intention to behave ethically and gender within the context of national culture. Using Reidenbach and Robin's measures of the ethical dimensions of justice and utilitarianism in a sample of business students from three different countries, we found that gender is significantly related to the respondents' intention to behave ethically. Women relied on both justice as well as utilitarianism when making moral decisions. By contrast, men relied only on justice, and did not rely on utilitarianism when faced with the same ethical issues. Further, women's intention to behave was contextual, significantly affected by two national culture dimensions (uncertainty avoidance and individualism), whereas men's decisions were more universal, and not related to national culture dimensions.     

The Current Link Between Management Behavior and Ethical Philosophy

The current linkages between ethical theory and management behavior are investigated. The vignettes used in this investigation represent ethical dilemmas in the areas of coercion and control, conflict of interest, physical environment, and personal integrity. Overall, even with heightened ethical awareness the link between ethical philosophy and management behavior remains similar to that of the early 1990s. Generally, practitioners still rely heavily on the utilitarian ethical philosophy when making business decisions. However, more managers are now likely to select ethically appropriate actions either because it is ethical to do so, or because the consequences or risk of not doing so are too great. This shift could positively impact the ethical climate of business decision-making.     

What is Different about Socially Responsible Funds? A Holdings-Based Analysis

Using samples from the U.S. and Puerto Rico, we examine cross-cultural differences in cultural value dimensions, and relate these to act and rule utilitarian orientations, and ethical decision making of business professionals. Although these places share the same legal environment, culturally they are distinct. In addition to tests of between-group differences, a model in which utilitarian orientation mediates the influence of cultural values on ethical decisions was evaluated at the individual level of analysis. Results indicated national culture differences on three cultural values, but no between-group differences on utilitarian orientations and ethical decisions. Significant indirect effects were found; act utilitarian orientation mediated the effects of two values activity orientation and universalism on ethical decision making. Implications for international management practices and business ethics are discussed.     

Business Executives’ Perceptions of Ethical Leadership and Its Development

This paper summarized the findings of a qualitative study that examines the perceptions of ethical leadership held by those who perceived themselves to be ethical leaders, and how life experiences shaped the values called upon when making ethical decisions. The experiences of 28 business executives were shared with the researcher, beginning with the recollection of a critical incident that detailed an ethical issue with which each executive had been involved. With the critical incident in mind, each executive told the personal story that explained the development of the values he or she called upon when resolving the ethical issue described. The stories were analyzed through the use of constant comparison, which resulted in the development of two models: (1) a framework for ethical leadership illuminating valued aspects of ethical leaderships and the value perspectives called upon when making ethical decisions, and (2) a model explaining how the executives’ ethical frameworks developed. The paper concludes with a brief discussion on virtue ethics, experiential learning, and human resource development.     

Perceptions of Dishonesty among Two-year College Students: Academic versus Business Situations

This study statistically analyzes two-year college students' attitudes toward cheating via a survey containing academic and business situations that the students evaluated on a seven point scale from unethical to ethical. When both the general questions concerning attitudes about cheating and the opinions on the ethical statements are considered, the business students were generally more unethical in their behavior and attitudes than non-business majors. These results indicate a need for more ethical exposure in business courses to help students distinguish ethical from unethical decisions.     

Challenges in Teaching Business Ethics: Using Role Set Analysis of Early Career Dilemmas

Emphasis in business ethics texts and courses has generally focused on corporate and other relatively high-level ethical issues. However, business school graduates in early career stages report ethical dilemmas involving individual-level decisions, often including influence attempts from one or more members of their work role sets. This paper proposes the use of role set analysis as a pedagogical technique for helping individuals to anticipate and deal with early-career ethical issues.     

Stakeholder Perceptions of Offshoring and Outsourcing: The Role of Embedded Issues

We contribute to the study of offshoring and outsourcing by examining how stakeholders’ ethical evaluations of these decisions are influenced by both their roles and the issues embedded within the decisions. Although offshoring and outsourcing have been studied from a transactional perspective, the moral issues embedded within these decisions can profoundly affect how the organization is perceived by outside stakeholders. First, we contend that investors use different moral paradigms compared with consumer stakeholders, as a result the stakeholder role an individual occupies significantly influences their ethical evaluation of offshoring and outsourcing decisions. Next, we examine whether embedded issues of product quality and information security increase the moral intensity of offshoring and outsourcing decisions, thereby negatively influencing ethical evaluations. Using vignettes, we find that respon- dents viewed either offshoring or outsourcing less favorably than relocation. Surprisingly, respondents viewed offshoring with data security risks more negatively than offshore outsourcing with quality risks, suggesting that the issue of information security has a greater moral intensity than the issue of product or service quality for both consumer and investor stakeholders. Thus, we show that that embedded issues play a significant role in stakeholders’ ethical judgments of business decisions, such as offshoring and outsourcing.     

Ethics and Australian International Business which way to Asia?

In an era of domestic and economic reform wherein deregulation/privatisation becomes a priority, short shift has too often been given to evaluative analyses of business activities. Evaluative monitoring and oversight are especially needful in highly competitive international business environments, where the temptations are very strong to adjudge individual effectiveness by the sole criterion of the bottom line. But what additional or alternative criteria should be administered, and by whom, is less clear. That any but the most vague Judeo-Christian or secular ethical standards are applicable (e.g. notions of fairness) is widely contested. The debate is significantly only widened when doing business across national borders involving peoples from different cultures and languages. This section is devoted to explicating the normative role of international codes of conduct for guiding the decision making of managers involved in multinational operations, and clarifying what ethical frameworks are available to the international manager for taking decisions which require selecting actions inconsistent with either home or host country demands.Daniel W. Skubik is a lecturer in the College of Liberal Arts, Florida Atlantic University; and is also an independent consultant. He holds the PhD (philosophy), a JD (law), and an MA (Hons.).     

The Impact of Ethical Leadership, the Internal Audit Function, and Moral Intensity on a Financial Reporting Decision

Two elements of corporate governance??the strength of ethical executive leadership and the internal audit function (IAF hereafter)??provide guidance to accounting managers making decisions involving uncertainty. We examine the joint effect of these two factors, manipulated at two levels (strong, weak), in an experiment in which accounting professionals decide whether to book a questionable journal entry (i.e., a journal entry for which a reasonable business case can be made but there is no supporting documentation). We find that ethical leadership and the IAF interact to determine the likelihood that accountants book the entry. Specifically, accountants are less likely to book a questionable journal entry when there is a weak ethical leader and a strong IAF compared to all other conditions. In addition, we find that accountants question the appropriateness and ethicalness of the request to book an undocumented journal entry more in the weak ethical leader and strong IAF condition than in the other conditions. These results suggest that the IAF has a different impact on financial reporting decisions depending on the ethicalness of executive leadership and that a strong IAF may cause accountants to question the appropriateness and ethicalness of an undocumented journal entry when combined with weak ethical leadership. We also find that the interactive effect of ethical leadership and the IAF on an accountant??s decision is fully mediated by his/her perception of the moral intensity of the issue. Thus, accountants, who perceive greater moral intensity associated with booking the entry, are less willing to do so.     

Ethical judgment in business: culture and differential perceptions of justice among Italians and Germans

This study focuses on the cultural context of ethical decision making by considering the relationship between power distance and ethical judgment. Specifically, we propose that this relationship exists because of the influence of peers on ethical judgment and perceptions of justice. Considering the importance of peers in stage three of Kohlberg's model of moral development, we argue that peers are the basis for social comparisons, social cues and social identification and, hence, are critical to an individual's beliefs about justice. Using scenarios developed by Reidenbach and Robin, data were collected from German and Italian graduate business students. Germany and Italy differ substantially in power distance, but not in the three other cultural dimensions of Hofstede. Results show that the ethical assessment of the respondents from the two countries differs when justice criteria are used. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.     

Successful U.S. Entrepreneurs: Identifying Ethical Decision-making and Social Responsibility Behaviors

This two-part study analyzed some of the ethical choices made by founding entrepreneurs during the creation and development of their ventures in order to identify the areas in which founding entrepreneurs must make decisions related to ethics or social responsibility during venture creation and development. Content analysis was used to identify decisions with ethical components and/or implications from in-depth interviews with 10 successful business founders. The research for part one of the study was guided by the following research question: In what areas must entrepreneurs make decisions with ethical and/or social responsibility implications during new venture creation and development? The authors identified four distinct categories of decisions where ethical or social responsibility components exist: (1) individual entrepreneurial values-related decisions, (2) organizational culture/employee well-being decisions, (3) customer satisfaction and quality decisions, and (4) external accountability decisions. In the second part of the study, the decisions identified in part one were analyzed using a framework derived from prior research in ethics. This framework was developed from the work of Kant (1964) who theorized about human morals and Rawls (1971) who developed theories about justice. Part two of the study was guided by the following research questions: Do entrepreneurs have values and ethics similar to those held by society in general? If they don’t, how do their values and ethics differ? The comparison revealed that the ethics and/or values that the entrepreneurs either explicitly or implicitly acknowledged were in fact similar to those of society in general.     

Business Ethical Values in China and the U.S.

The research presented in this paper focuses on business ethical values inChina, a country in which the process of institutional transformation has left cultural values in a state of flux. A survey was conducted in China and the U.S. by using five business scenarios. Survey results show similarities between the Chinese and American decision choices for three out of five scenarios. However, the results reveal significant differences in rationales, even forsimilar decisions. The implications of similarities and differences between the U.S. and Chinese samples are discussed.     

Well-being Marketing: An Ethical Business Philosophy for Consumer Goods Firms

In this article we build on the program of research in well-being marketing by further conceptualizing and refining the conceptual domain of the concept of consumer well-being (CWB). We then argue that well-being marketing is a business philosophy grounded in business ethics. We show how this philosophy is an ethical extension of relationship marketing (stakeholder theory in business ethics) and is superior to transactional marketing (a business philosophy grounded in the principles of consumer sovereignty). Additionally, we argue that well-being marketing is based on duty ethics concepts, specifically the duty of beneficence and non-maleficence. Subsequently, we show how the well-being concept guides marketing decisions for consumer goods firms.     

Using Computer-Based Simulation Exercises to Teach Business Ethics

This paper discusses how to introduce ethical dilemmas into computer-based business simulation exercise to teach business ethics. Simulations have an inherent advantage over other pedagogies for teaching ethics because simulations provide students with both an intellectual and a behavioral exposure to the topic. Issues addressed include considerations before writing ethical dilemmas, the writing of ethical dilemmas, and process issues for introducing ethical dilemmas. An example is developed and discussed. Through the process described, instructors can better prepare students for a lifetime of tough business decisions.     

Therapy,Enhancement, and Medicine: Challenges for the Doctor–Patient Relationship and Patient Safety

There are ethical guidelines that form the foundation of the traditional doctor–patient relationship in medicine. Health care providers are under special obligations to their patients. These include obligations to disclose information, to propose alternative treatments that allow patients to make decisions based on their own values, and to have special concern for patients’ best interests. Furthermore, patients know that these obligations exist and so come to their physicians with a significant level of trust. In this sense, therapeutic medicine significantly differs from straightforward business practices such as the buying and selling of houses, cars, cell phones, etc. However, we argue that this relationship differs when medicine is used for enhancement rather than therapy. When patients seek enhancements they are not as vulnerable as when they are ill. And in an enhancement setting, physicians have little role outside of medical risks to discuss motivation and alternatives. Therefore, we conclude that a more reasonable alternative may be for doctors and patients to use ethical norms associated more with straightforward business practices, specifically sales. We believe that full disclosure of this different set of norms will benefit both physicians and patients.