The Influence of Organizations’ Tax Avoidance Practices on Consumers’ Behavior: The Role of Moral Reasoning Strategies,Political Ideology,and Brand Identification

Journal of Business Ethics - This study adopts moral reasoning strategies (moral rationalization and decoupling) to investigate why consumers support companies involved in ethical transgressions....     

Consumers’ Responses to Public Figures’ Transgression: Moral Reasoning Strategies and Implications for Endorsed Brands

This paper proposes an empirical assessment of the main factors behind the decision of a corporate sponsor to launch a socially responsible (SR) fund. Our analysis is performed on a database that encompasses 414 SR fund creations by 46 corporate sponsors between 1990 and 2012. We provide evidence that economic and human resources slack, leverage, low media coverage and high extra-financial performance of the corporate sponsor contribute to an increase of the probability to propose SR funds. These results lead us to argue that the introduction of such funds goes beyond the economic objective of enlarging the market share of the corporate sponsor. It may thus be seen as a particular strategy in terms of communication and signaling, due to the specific characteristics of SR funds.     

Moral Reasoning Skills: Are Entrepreneurs Different?

Drawing on existing theory in the fields of business ethics, entrepreneurship, and psychology, this research provides an initial empirical exploration of whether entrepreneurs use cognitive reasoning processes which reflect a higher level of moral development than the level of moral development that has been empirically observed either in middle-level managers or in the general adult population. The Defining Issues Test was used to measure the level of moral reasoning skill of the entrepreneurs in this study. Although the study was limited by a small sample size and the inherent difficulty of making accurate comparisons across other empirical studies, the results of this study suggest that entrepreneurs may exhibit moral reasoning skills at a slightly higher level than middle-level managers or the general adult population.     

Counterfeiting: Friend or Foe of Luxury Brands? An Examination of Chinese Consumers’ Attitudes Toward Counterfeit Luxury Brands

ABSTRACT

While the Chinese luxury industry is enjoying rapid growth, the market for counterfeit luxury brands is growing equally fast. There are contradictory views regarding the role counterfeit luxury brands play in the marketplace. Luxury brand owners denounce counterfeit luxury products for harming the reputation of luxury brands and reducing their profitability. Others believe that the availability of counterfeit luxury products may help increase the brand awareness of luxury names and thereby make authentic products more sought after. In this study, we examine the impact of counterfeit luxury products from the consumers’ standpoint. Specifically, the authors investigate whether and how Chinese consumers with different luxury consumption experiences view counterfeit luxury products differently. The study contributes to a better understanding of Chinese consumers’ attitudes toward counterfeit luxury products and thus helps marketers and policy makers develop more effective strategies for dealing with the issue.     

ERP Study of Liberals’ and Conservatives’ Moral Reasoning Processes: Evidence from South Korea

Journal of Business Ethics - Do liberals’ and conservatives’ brain processes differ in moral reasoning? This research explains these groups’ dissimilar moral stances when they...     

Susceptibility to the ‘Dark Side’ of Goal-Setting: Does Moral Justification Influence the Effect of Goals on Unethical Behavior?

Setting goals in the workplace can motivate improved performance but it might also compromise ethical behavior. In this paper, we propose that individual differences in the dispositional tendency to morally justify behavior moderate the effects of specific performance goals on unethical behavior. We conducted an experimental study in which working participants, who were randomly assigned to a specific goal condition or to a condition with a vague goal that lacked a specific target (i.e., ‘do your best’), completed two tasks in which they had the opportunity to act unethically. In an ethical dilemma task, participants in the specific goal condition were more likely to advocate using unethical methods. However, in an anagram task, only those with high moral justification overstated their performance to a greater degree in the specific goal condition. As such, individuals may not be equally susceptible to the ‘dark side’ of goal-setting.     

Influence of Language of Packaging Labels on Consumers’ Buying Preferences

Can packaging labels of three different foreign languages (Korean, Japanese, and English) affect consumers’ preferences? In a month of field experiment involving 203 Chinese undergraduate students, this study used coffee as an experimental product and created a fictitious brand “7 AM COFFEE.” Using analysis of variance (ANOVA) as a statistical tool, the results of the experiment show that the English language represents the strongest effect for (1) consumers’ attention, (2) trust, (3) perceived quality, (4) taste perception, and (5) purchase intention. Moreover, consumers with high or low frequencies of drinking a coffee do not have a specific preference in relations to their attitude. The findings and discussion of this research provide better direction for marketing managers of beverages in establishing market strategies to promote products and generating appeal among coffee drinker.     

The Relationships of Empathy,Moral Identity and Cynicism with Consumers’ Ethical Beliefs: The Mediating Role of Moral Disengagement

This study examines the relationships of empathy, moral identity and cynicism with the following dimensions of consumer ethics: the passive dimension (passively benefiting at the expense of the seller), the active/legal dimension (benefiting from questionable but legal actions), the ‘no harm, no foul’ dimension (actions that do not harm anyone directly but are considered unethical by some) and the ‘doing-good’/recycling dimension (pro-social actions). A survey of six hundred Australian consumers revealed that both empathy and moral identity were related to negative beliefs regarding the passive and the active/legal dimensions of consumer ethics and were related to positive beliefs regarding the ‘doing-good’/recycling dimension. Cynicism was related to positive beliefs regarding the passive dimension of consumer ethics and was related to negative beliefs regarding the ‘doing-good’/recycling dimension. The role of moral disengagement in mediating these relationships was examined. Empathy and moral identity were only indirectly negatively related to the ‘no harm, no foul’ dimension of consumer ethics through moral disengagement, while cynicism was indirectly positively related to this dimension through moral disengagement. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Does Job Function Influence Ethical Reasoning? An Adapted Wason Task Application

A review of extent business ethics research uncovered well over 200 published articles that investigated the role of job functions within a business organization as an explanatory factor of ethical or unethical behavior. While an important body of work, ethical breaches are often found to cut across job functions and involve multiple disciplines embedded in a business organization. This research seeks to explore a cross-functional explanation for ethical reasoning by using an instrument new to business ethics research, the Wason selection task, but well-grounded and validated in cognitive research and evolutionary psychology, to assess an individual’s ability to detect rule-based social contract violations. A sample of 276 full-time business practitioners, enrolled in part-time M.B.A. programs, from the accounting, finance, information technology, marketing, supply chain, and human resource management job functions were compared on their ability to detect rule violators across a series of production scenarios in the Wason selection task. Rates of cheater detection were calculated to determine if substantive differences existed across job functions. This was followed by a series of pair-wise comparisons of percentages of cheater detection across the job functions using z-tests for assessing statistical significance. The data analysis showed differences in cheater detection, with most of the variance due to the marketing job function group. Insights from this study for scholars, educators, and practitioners in the business ethics field are discussed.     

Does Job Function Influence Ethical Reasoning? An Adapted Wason Task Application

A review of extent business ethics research uncovered well over 200 published articles that investigated the role of job functions within a business organization as an explanatory factor of ethical or unethical behavior. While an important body of work, ethical breaches are often found to cut across job functions and involve multiple disciplines embedded in a business organization. This research seeks to explore a cross-functional explanation for ethical reasoning by using an instrument new to business ethics research, the Wason selection task, but well-grounded and validated in cognitive research and evolutionary psychology, to assess an individual’s ability to detect rule-based social contract violations. A sample of 276 full-time business practitioners, enrolled in part-time M.B.A. programs, from the accounting, finance, information technology, marketing, supply chain, and human resource management job functions were compared on their ability to detect rule violators across a series of production scenarios in the Wason selection task. Rates of cheater detection were calculated to determine if substantive differences existed across job functions. This was followed by a series of pair-wise comparisons of percentages of cheater detection across the job functions using z-tests for assessing statistical significance. The data analysis showed differences in cheater detection, with most of the variance due to the marketing job function group. Insights from this study for scholars, educators, and practitioners in the business ethics field are discussed.     

Opportunity Identification and Pursuit: Does an Entrepreneur’s Human Capital Matter?

Extending human capital approaches to entrepreneurship, an entrepreneur’s “inputs” relating to their general (i.e. education and work experience) and entrepreneurship-specific human capital profile (i.e. business ownership experience, managerial capabilities, entrepreneurial capabilities and technical capabilities) are presumed to be related to entrepreneurial “outputs” in the form of business opportunity identification and pursuit. Valid and reliable independent variables were gathered from a stratified random sample of 588 owners of private firms. Ordered logit analysis was used to test several theoretically derived hypotheses. With regard to the number of business opportunities identified and pursued, entrepreneurship-specific rather than general human capital variables “explained” more of the variance. Entrepreneurs reporting higher information search intensity identified significantly more business opportunities, but they did not pursue markedly more or less opportunities. The use of publications as a source of information was positively associated with the probability of identifying more opportunities, while information emanating from personal, professional and business networks was not. Implications for practitioners and researchers are discussed.      

Investigating the Effects of Gender on Consumers’ Moral Philosophies and Ethical Intentions

Using information collected from a convenience sample of graduate and undergraduate students affiliated with a Midwestern university in the United States, this study determined the extent to which gender (defined as sex differences) is related to consumers’ moral philosophies and ethical intentions. Multivariate and univariate results indicated that women were more inclined than men to utilize both consequence-based and rule-based moral philosophies in questionable consumption situations. In addition, women placed more importance on an overall moral philosophy than did men, and women had higher intentions to behave ethically. The marketing and practical implications of these findings are discussed, and the limitations of the research are presented along with several suggestions for future inquiry, which could advance current understanding of consumer ethics.     

What Sparks Ethical Decision Making? The Interplay Between Moral Intuition and Moral Reasoning: Lessons from the Scholastic Doctrine

There has been limited coverage of the corporate responsibility (CR) practices of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the mainstream CR literature. Furthermore, there has been no systematic analysis of the responsibilities of the high value jewellery industry and jewellery SMEs in particular. This study explores the potential for harm and value creation by individual stakeholders in fine jewellery production. Using the harm chain and institutional theory to frame our investigation, we seek to understand how small businesses within the fine jewellery industry respond to the economic, social and environmental challenges associated with responsible jewellery production, and to investigate how they perceive and negotiate the tensions between responsibility and the resistance derived from the operational norms of secrecy and autonomy within the industry. Our exploratory research provides illustrative examples of how complex harm networks operate within and across the fine jewellery industry, and demonstrates the inter-relationships that exist across the different stages of the fine jewellery harm chain. Findings suggest that institutional forces are coalescing towards a more responsible agenda for the fine jewellery industry. Moreover, while CR is a tool to disrupt harmful institutional norms and practices within such an industry, it requires the co-creation of new transformative business models and multi-stakeholder involvement including firms (SMEs and MNEs), trade associations, non-governmental organisations and consumers. Solutions include national and international legislation, price adjusted certification routes for small firms, harmonisation of industry CR standards to reduce overlap in certification and regulation and gem and precious metal “track and trace” schemes.     

The Influence of Sociodemographic and Lifestyle Factors on Consumers’ Healthy Cereal Food Choices

An increase in the dietary intake of wholegrain cereals can reduce the risk of developing certain non-communicable diseases and can play an important role in a healthy diet. However, consumption of wholegrain cereals across many countries is lower that the recommended guidelines. The main objective of this research was to gather purchase-related information from end users on different types of cereal foods. A mixed research methodology was used to identify key sociodemographic and lifestyle factors that may influence consumer acceptance of new cereal foods. Three distinct clusters were identified based on six identified lifestyle dimensions. This research suggested that the combined use of sociodemographic and lifestyle segmentation variables could help identify specific consumer segments that can be used in the market-oriented development of new cereal foods.     

The Impact of Intrinsic Religiosity on Consumers’ Ethical Beliefs: Does It Depend on the Type of Religion? A Comparison of Christian and Moslem Consumers in Germany and Turkey

Intrinsic religiosity drives ethical consumer behavior; however, previous studies regarding this connection are limited solely to a Christian cultural context. This comparative study instead includes Christian Consumers from Germany and Moslem Consumers from Turkey to determine if a specific religious community moderates the connection between intrinsic religiosity and consumer ethics. The results show that Consumers in the Turkish, Moslem subsample, exhibit an even stronger connection between religiosity and ethical consumer behavior than Consumers from the German, Christian subsample.     

Examining the Effects of Moral Development Level,Self-Concept,and Self-Monitoring on Consumers’ Ethical Attitudes

This study investigates the possible effects of self-concept, self-monitoring, and moral development level on dimensions of consumers’ ethical attitudes. “Actively benefiting from illegal activities,” “actively benefiting from deceptive practices,” and “no harm/no foul 1–2” are defined by factor analysis as four dimensions of Turkish consumers’ ethical attitudes. Logistic regression analysis is applied to data collected from 516 Turkish households. Results indicate that self-monitoring and moral development level predicted consumer ethics in relation to “actively benefiting from questionable practices” and “no harm/no foul” dimensions. Actual self-concept is also a predictor variable in relation to “no harm/no foul” dimension. Age and gender make significant differences in consumers’ ethical attribute dimensions.     

‘Consumers’ Evaluation of Unethical Marketing Behaviors: The Role of Customer Commitment’

While there is a significant amount of research investigating managerial ethical judgments, a limited amount examines consumer judgments of unethical corporate behavior and its impact on the marketplace. This study examines how consumers’ commitment to a company impacts not only their ethical judgment of corporate behavior but also the outcomes of that judgment. The authors test hypotheses with data from 334 consumers and find that consumers’ level of commitment attenuates the level of perceived fairness. More specifically, highly committed consumers may forgive companies for behaviors when perceived harm is low, but become progressively dissatisfied as the level of perceived harm increases. Results of the study point to the importance of considering ethical behavior from a consumer perspective. If corporate actions are perceived as unethical, the company stands to lose favor with their most committed customers. Considering that more time, effort and investment is required to gain a new customer as to retain an old, this study shows that engaging in behavior perceived as unethical by consumers risks alienating the most committed customers.     

What Role Does Sense of Power Play in Consumers’ Decision Making of Risky Food Consumption While Dining Out?

One way to understand risky food consumption is to look at the influence of the sense of power, as well as optimism bias. The purpose of this study was to examine how the sense of power affects consumers’ intention to consume risky foods by assessing the direct relationship between their sense of power and subsequent consumption of risky foods, and investigating the indirect relationship between sense of power and risky food consumption with general optimism bias or food safety optimism bias as a mediating variable. A web-based questionnaire with 387 responses was used to test the hypotheses and the indirect relationships from the sense of power to intention to consume risky foods via food safety optimism. Findings indicate the theoretical implication of a new variable (food safety optimism) that is useful in understanding the relationship between the sense of power and risky food consumption. Results also offer practical implications on better ways to market raw or undercooked foods to potential consumers.     

Factors that Influence Consumers’ Attitudes toward Internet Buying in Nigeria

The study used previously validated measurement instrument to investigate, in a Nigerian context, the extent to which some specific factors like perceived security, perceived privacy, perceived integrity, constrained consumer’s product need, personality, perceived ease of use, perceived usability, perceived usefulness, and previous experience in Internet buying predict consumers’ attitude towards Internet buying in Nigeria. The survey research was adopted and the population of the study consisted of postgraduate management students form University of Benin, Benson Idahosa University, Ambrose Ali University, and Graduate MBA Students from the University of Benin. Data were analyzed using regression, t test and ANOVA. The research findings were: perceived privacy, constrained product need, consumers’ previous online experience and perceived usability exert strong predictive influence on consumers’ attitude towards internet buying in Nigeria. In view of the findings, a modified model that addresses the key factors influencing consumers’ attitude towards Internet buying in Nigeria is proposed.