Investigating the impact of guilt and shame proneness on consumer ethics: a cross national study

Studies show that emotions of guilt and shame significantly influence how people live their daily lives when it comes to making ethical decisions. Nonetheless, individuals’ proneness toward guilt and shame has received limited attention in consumer behaviour literature. The study focuses on the impact of anticipated emotions (i.e. guilt and shame) on various consumers’ ethical and unethical behaviours. Using a combination of a panel data sample and a university sample, the overall results between the two countries (i.e. Australia and Indonesia) reveal more similarities than differences. Consumers with high guilt‐proneness are less likely to agree on those unethical behaviours. This study has important theoretical implications for understanding the similarities and differences between both nations and the impact of guilt and shame proneness on consumer ethics.     

Managing organizational ethics: How ethics becomes pervasive within organizations

This study analyzes real experiences of culture management to better understand how ethics permeates organizations. In addition to reviewing the literature, we used an action-research methodology and conducted semistructured interviews in Spain and in the U.S. to approach the complexity and challenges of fostering a culture in which ethical considerations are a regular part of business discussions and decision making. The consistency of findings suggests patterns of organizational conditions, cultural elements, and opportunities that influence the management of organizational cultures centered on core ethical values. The ethical competencies of leaders and of the workforce also emerged as key factors. We identify three conditions—a sense of responsibility to society, conditions for ethical deliberation, and respect for moral autonomy—coupled with a diverse set of cultural elements that cause ethics to take root in culture when the opportunity arises. Leaders can use this knowledge of the mechanisms by which organizational factors influence ethical pervasiveness to better manage organizational ethics.     

The role of moral intensity and moral philosophy in ethical decision making: a cross‐cultural comparison of China and the European Union

The present study uses cross‐cultural samples of marketing practitioners from two European Union (EU) nations (the United Kingdom and Spain) and China to examine the relationships between moral intensity, personal moral philosophies and ethical decision making. Additionally, cross‐cultural comparisons were made regarding intentions, personal moral philosophies and moral intensity. Results indicate that both samples tend to use the perceived harm construct (e.g. magnitude of consequences, probability of effect, temporal immediacy and concentration of effect) to determine intentions in situations involving ethical issues. However, social consensus tends to be situation‐specific for both groups and proximity seems not to be used at all when making decisions in situations involving ethics. As for personal moral philosophies, idealism is only used by the EU sample; however, for both samples, the use of relativism depends upon the specific situation.     

Caring and Conflicted: Mothers’ Ethical Judgments about Consumption

Literature on consumer ethics tends to focus on issues within the public sphere, such as the environment, and treats other drivers of consumption decisions, such as family, as non-moral concerns. Consequently, an attitude–behaviour gap is viewed as a straightforward failure by consumers to act ethically. We argue that this is based upon a view of consumer behaviour as linear and unproblematic, and an approach to moral reasoning, arising from a stereotypically masculine understanding of morality, which foregrounds abstract principles. By demonstrating the importance of context to consumption decisions and articulating the impact of caring relationships, we highlight how such decisions are both complex and situated. This is particularly evident for decisions involving the needs of others, as occurs in family life. We argue that the incorporation of care ethics provides both theoretical insights and a more complete account of consumer ethics. This is explored empirically through an investigation of the ethical dilemmas arising from consumption decisions made by mothers of young children. Such decisions juxtapose an ethical consumption orientation (representing impartial concerns) with care for one’s child. Therefore, what has been previously considered a failure to act ethically may in fact be the outcome of complex decision making, which involves competing ethical considerations. We discuss the implications of our findings for theory and practice and how this approach to consumer ethics could be applied more widely.     

Neuromarketing: Ethical Implications of its Use and Potential Misuse

Neuromarketing is an emerging field in which academic and industry research scientists employ neuroscience techniques to study marketing practices and consumer behavior. The use of neuroscience techniques, it is argued, facilitates a more direct understanding of how brain states and other physiological mechanisms are related to consumer behavior and decision making. Herein, we will articulate common ethical concerns with neuromarketing as currently practiced, focusing on the potential risks to consumers and the ethical decisions faced by companies. We argue that the most frequently raised concerns—threats to consumer autonomy, privacy, and control—do not rise to meaningful ethical issues given the current capabilities and implementation of neuromarketing research. But, we identify how potentially serious ethical issues may emerge from neuromarketing research practices in industry, which are largely proprietary and opaque. We identify steps that can mitigate associated ethical risks and thus reduce the threats to consumers. We conclude that neuromarketing has clear potential for positive impact on society and consumers, a fact rarely considered in the discussion on the ethics of neuromarketing.     

How Do Salespeople Make Decisions? The Role of Emotions and Deliberation on Adaptive Selling,and the Moderating Role of Intuition

This research explores how salespeople make decisions and what factors influence these decisions. Research in psychology suggests that, in making decisions, people use both intuition and deliberation, often relying on some degree of both processes. This study examines the impact of emotion, intuition, and deliberation on a salesperson's adaptability and resulting performance. Intuition is found to play a significant moderating role in the relationships between both deliberation and regulation of emotions on adaptive selling. However, as anticipated, the role of this moderation variable differs for each of these relationships. Findings suggest that intuition provides an important input to deliberative and emotive thought processes, and plays an important role in salesperson adaptiveness. Implications for salesperson mentoring and training programs are explored.     

Considerations in Ethical Decision-Making and Software Piracy

Individuals are faced with the many opportunities to pirate. The decision to pirate or not may be related to an individual's attitudes toward other ethical issues. A person's ethical and moral predispositions and the judgments that they use to make decisions may be consistent across various ethical dilemmas and may indicate their likelihood to pirate software. This paper investigates the relationship between religion and a theoretical ethical decision making process that an individual uses when evaluating ethical or unethical situations. An ethical decision making model was studied for general unethical scenarios and for the unethical behavior of software piracy. The research model was tested via path analysis using structural equation modeling and was found to be appropriate for the sample data. The results suggest that there is a relationship between religion and the stages of an ethical decision making process regarding general ethical situations and software piracy.     

Exploring Postconsumption Guilt and Pride in the Context of Sustainability

This research explores the feelings of guilt and pride experienced by consumers after a purchase decision that involves issues of environmental and social sustainability. Through a multi‐method design, the authors examine key dimensions that influence the process of emotional appraisal, illustrate the characteristics of appraisals of guilt/pride and investigate the consequences that emotions have on future choices. In this exploratory research, when a purchase decision includes an ethical dilemma, consumers were found to express guilt or pride even when the purchase is not intentional, i.e. forced by circumstances. Moreover, the study explores how emotions experienced after decisions may have a positive influence on the future purchase of sustainable alternatives. Finally, the paper proposes a new model that describes the process of emotional appraisal and reports on a number of dimensions that were found to lead to guilt and pride. The insights presented extend knowledge of two key consumer emotions and present important implications for practitioners promoting ethical products.     

Anger Strays,Fear Refrains: The Differential Effect of Negative Emotions on Consumers’ Ethical Judgments

Although various factors have been studied for their influence on consumers’ ethical judgments, the role of incidental emotions has received relatively less attention. Recent research in consumer behavior has focused on studying the effect of specific incidental emotions on various aspects of consumer decision making. This paper investigates the effect of two negative, incidental emotional states of anger and fear on ethical judgment in a consumer context using a passive unethical behavior scenario (i.e., too much change received). The paper presents two experimental studies. Study 1 focuses on the interaction of moral intensity (amount of change) and incidental emotion state in predicting the ethical judgment while study 2 investigates the underlying causal mechanism behind the process, using a mediation analysis. The results reveal a significant interaction between moral intensity and incidental emotion. Specifically, individuals in the state of incidental fear exhibit higher levels of ethical judgment as the moral intensity increases as compared to individuals in the state of incidental anger. Further, perceived control is found to mediate the relationship between emotional state and ethical judgment under higher moral intensity condition.     

Ethical Decision Making: Special or No Different?

Theories of ethical decision making assume it is a process that is special, or different in some regard, from typical individual decision making. Empirical results of the most widely known theories in the field of business ethics contain numerous inconsistencies and contradictions. In an attempt to assess why we continue to lack understanding of how individuals make ethical decisions at work, an inductive study of ethical decision making was conducted. The results of this preliminary study suggest that ethical decision making might not be meaningfully “special” or different from other decision making processes. The implications of this research are potentially significant in that they challenge the fundamental assumption of existing ethical decision making research. This research could serve as an impetus for further examination of whether ethical decision making is meaningfully different from other decision making processes. Such studies could create new directions for the field of business ethics.     

Ethical Decision Making in Multinational Organizations: A Culture-Based Model

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between national culture and ethical decision making. Established theories of ethics and moral development are reviewed and a culture-based model of ethical decision making in organizations is derived. Although the body of knowledge in both cross-cultural management and ethics is well documented, researchers have failed to integrate the influence of cultural values into the ethical decision-making paradigm. A conceptual understanding of how managers from different nations make decisions about highly ethical issues will provide business ethics researchers with a sound theoretical foundation upon which future empirical inquiry can be based.     

Corporate Directors and Social Responsibility: Ethics versus Shareholder Value

This paper reports on the results of an experiment conducted with experienced corporate directors. The study findings indicate that directors employ prospective rationality cognition, and they sometimes make decisions that emphasize legal defensibility at the expense of personal ethics and social responsibility. Directors recognize the ethical and social implications of their decisions, but they believe that current corporate law requires them to pursue legal courses of action that maximize shareholder value. The results suggest that additional ethics education will have little influence on the decisions of many business leaders because their decisions are driven by corporate law, rather than personal ethics. Jacob Rose is Associate Professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His research emphasizes judgment and decision making in accounting and governance contexts.     

Ethical consumer decision‐making: The role of need for cognition and affective responses

Most of the academic research in the field of consumer ethics has focused on the cognitive antecedents and processes of unethical consumer behavior. However, the specific roles of discrete emotions such as fear have not yet been investigated thoroughly. This research examines the role of the need for cognition (NFC), the three affective responses—fear, power, and excitement—and perceived issue importance on moral intensity, ethical perceptions, and ethical intentions for four types of unethical consumer behaviors. A sample of consumers from the two cities of Alexandria and Cairo, Egypt (n = 346) participated in the survey. Most research hypotheses were supported. NFC, issue importance, and affect variables were all predictors of moral intensity, ethical perceptions, and ethical intentions in four different consumer ethics scenarios. The specific predictors varied from one consumer ethics scenario to another, however.     

The Role of Anticipated Emotions in Purchase Intentions

Key personal inputs to decision making reside in expectations about whether a purchase or nonpurchase will make one feel better. Integrating several theoretical approaches, this research proposes a holistic framework formed by four kinds of anticipated emotions (AEs) resulting from the crossing of positive‐ or negative‐valenced emotions with action or inaction. Specifically, this research proposes that consumers under a purchase scenario tend to consider positive and negative AEs of both purchase and nonpurchase in their decisions. Research in this area to date has been sparse and focused mostly on AEs with regard to purchase, but not nonpurchase. The results of four studies confirm that AEs influence purchase decisions in a coordinated way depending on their instrumentality, motivating purchase or nonpurchase. AEs also partially mediate the effect of outcome valence on purchase decisions. Taking the status quo bias as a theoretical basis, this work proposes that the amount of information of favorable and unfavorable outcome messages has a greater influence on AEs motivating purchase than AEs motivating nonpurchase. Finally, future research lines are proposed to expand the use of this fourfold framework and more generally to understand the role of forward‐looking emotions in decision processes.     

Decision rules used by male and female business students in making ethical value judgments: Another look

This study was conducted to corroborate findings that females invoke a decision rule that is significantly different from that of their male counterparts when making ethical value judgements. In addition, the study examines whether the same decision rule is used by men and women for all types of ethical situations. The results show that males and females use different decision rules when making ethical evaluations, although there are types of situations where there are no significant differences in decision rules used by men and women. The results do not suggest that any one particular decision rule is used by the majority of either males or females in different types of ethical judgements. There is a greater diversity in decision rules used by females than by males.Sharon Galbraith, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Albers School of Business and Economics at Seattle University, Seattle, Washington. She teaches Marketing and does research in the areas of consumer information processing, pedagogy, and business ethics.Harriet Stephenson, Ph.D., Professor of Management in the Albers School of Business and Economics, is Director of The Entrepreneurship Center at Seattle University. She teaches Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management and Business Policy and Organization and does research in areas of business ethics and entrepreneurship, and marketing for small business.This study deals only with the decision processes used in evaluating acceptability or unacceptability of certain actions. This is a sample question from the questionnaire.     

Personal Characteristics Underlying Ethical Decisions in Marketing Situations: A Survey of Small Business Managers*

This study analyzes the marketing ethics decision‐making process of small business managers. In particular, it examines the relative influences of ethical perceptions, personal moral philosophies, and gender on ethical intentions of small business managers. The sample of this study consists of professional members of the American Marketing Association working in companies with 500 employees or fewer. The results reveal that perceived ethical problem is a positive factor of a small business manager's ethical intention. The results generally support our hypothesis that female managers tend to be more ethical in their intention than their male counterparts. However, the results indicate that neither dimension of personal moral philosophy—idealism and relativism—is a significant predictor of a manager's ethical intention.     

Compensatory Ethics

Several theories, both ancient and recent, suggest that having the time to contemplate a decision should increase moral awareness and the likelihood of ethical choices. Our findings indicated just the opposite: greater time for deliberation led to less ethical decisions. Post-hoc analyses and a followup experiment suggested that decision makers act as if their previous choices have created or lost moral credentials: after an ethical first choice, people acted significantly less ethically in their subsequent choice but after an unethical first choice, people acted significantly more ethically in their subsequent choice. These findings provide the basis for a model of compensatory ethics.     

Ethical leadership and the dual roles of examples

Through the examples they set, leaders do a great deal to shape—for good or for ill—the culture of the organizations in which they serve. Leaders thus serve in a teaching role. But in order to learn how to set positive examples, leaders must also be students who seek to learn what they can from others’ examples. Employing as a jumping-off point a recent high-profile and multi-faceted scandal involving Penn State University and decision makers affiliated with it, this article explores a number of ethical decision making lessons to be learned from that scandal and considers how those lessons can be applied to a variety of decisions faced by corporate leaders. Along the way, the article addresses ways in which common human tendencies impair the quality of thinking and decision making. It also offers ways for improving thinking quality and enhancing the ethical nature of resulting business decisions.