Contextual effects on ethical sensitivity and penalty judgments

The aim of the current study is to explore thepotential existence of contextual effects onethical sensitivity and penalty judgments. Inso doing, Turkish female and male businessstudents' ethical judgments for accounting andgeneral business contexts are investigated,along with their penalty judgments in these twosettings. The results of this study reveal nosignificant gender-related differences inethical judgments on accounting issues, butsignificant gender differences are observed ingeneral business scenarios. This findingsupports the proposition that observeddifferences of ethical judgments between thegenders may be contextual. The resultsindicate that there is higher ethical awarenessfor both genders in general business contexts,with females showing stronger ethicalsensitivity than males for general businessvignettes. In general, males are found toprefer harsher penalties than females foraccounting settings and for all penaltychoices. Analyses of penalty judgments betweenthe groups of individuals who are moreethically sensitive and who are less ethicallysensitive reveals that there exist significantdifferences between these groups in all penaltychoices, with ethically-more-sensitive groupparticipants preferring stronger penalties.     

Does consumer‐firm affiliation matter? The impact of social distance on consumers’ moral judgments

When the leader of a firm commits a professional transgression, how would customers’ judgments of the transgressor's professional performance and immorality differ from those of noncustomers’? This research answers this question by investigating factors that explain the discrepancy in moral judgments between noncustomers and customers affiliated with the firm of a transgressing leader. Drawing on construal level theory, our two experimental studies consistently demonstrate that relative to high social distance (i.e., noncustomers), low social distance (i.e., customers) leads to more positive judgments of the transgressor's professional performance, but differences in the social distance do not directly lead to disparities in judgments of immorality. Social distance, however, affects both performance and immorality judgments when mediating mechanisms (conscious and nonconscious moral reasoning) are accounted for, such that low social distance indirectly influences customers to be more lenient in not only their performance judgments but also their immorality judgments. This research contributes to the topic of morality that permeates the current discourse on ethical business transgressions and, in particular, to an understanding of specific mechanisms that guide consumers’ moral judgments.     

The Effects of Religiosity on Ethical Judgments

The relationship between religiosity and ethical behavior at work has remained elusive. In fact, inconsistent results in observed magnitudes and direction led Hood et al. (The psychology of religion: An empirical approach, 1996) to describe the relationship between religiosity and ethics as “something of a roller coaster ride.” Weaver and Agle (Acad Manage Rev 27(1):77–97, 2002) utilizing social structural versions of symbolic interactionism theory reasoned that we should not expect religion to affect ethical outcomes for all religious individuals; rather, such a relationship likely depends on specific religious attitudes including religious motivation orientation (intrinsic RMO vs. extrinsic RMO), perceived sacred qualities of work (job sanctification), and views of God (VOG, loving vs. punishing). We examined the effects of these three religious attitudes on participants’ judgments of 29 ethically questionable vignettes. Consistent with symbolic interactionism theory, intrinsic RMO and having a loving view of God were both negatively related to endorsing ethically questionable vignettes, whereas extrinsic RMO was positively related to endorsing the vignettes. Unexpectedly, job sanctification was positively related to endorsing the vignettes. However, both intrinsic and extrinsic RMO moderated this relationship such that sanctifying one’s job was related to ethical judgments only for those who were: (a) low in intrinsic RMO or (b) high in extrinsic RMO. We reasoned based on symbolic interactionism theory that intrinsically motivated participants, in contrast to extrinsically motivated participants, may have utilized their religious beliefs as a guiding framework in making ethical judgments.     

Multiple Stakeholder Judgments of Employee Behaviors: A Contingent Prototype Model of Dishonesty

This paper describes the moral judgments made by various stakeholders in determining whether an event, caused by an organizational employee, constitutes dishonesty. It models person-situation interaction effects of situations in organizational settings and persons making moral judgments to predict judgments of dishonesty. Using a prototype definition of dishonesty, the paper examines the effects of differences in four areas (the prototypicality of the act, the actor's motivation, the potential consequences, and the person judging the event) on the moral judgment of whether the event constitutes dishonesty. The implications for managers and researchers of the resulting contingent prototype model of dishonesty are discussed.     

Individual and Small Group Accuracy in Judging Truthful and Deceptive Communication

We examined accuracy in detecting the truths and lies of 10 videotaped students who offered their opinions on the death penalty or smoking in public. Student lie detectors were randomly assigned to either the individual condition, where they reported their veracity judgments and confidence independently, or the small group condition, where they recorded their judgments privately and then deliberated with 5 other students before making a consensus judgment of lie, truth, or hung. Results indicated that small group judgments were more accurate than individual judgments when judging deceptive but not truthful communication. Small group individuals also reported greater confidence in their abilities after the task. Finally, groups with a greater number of hung judgments were more accurate, likely due to their employing hung judgments for the most difficult to judge stimulus communicators. These results raise implications for real life group judgments, particularly in light of the increasing availability of technology.     

THE PHYSICAL ATTRACTIVENESS STEREOTYPE USING DRESS AS A FACILITATOR

Seventy-two respondents completed a series of scales indicating their perceptions of a photographed bogus partner. Each partner was, in fact, the same person wearing a different form of dress. One of the judgments was a self-rating of the physical attractiveness of the partner. ANOVA yielded significant effects for judgments of intelligence, morality, and psychological adjustment. For each judgment, significant differences were found between those who perceived their partners as attractive and neutrally attractive, and attractive and unattractive. These results support the hypothesis that the physical attractiveness stereotype can be extended to include the total body form.     

Issue-Contingent Effects on Ethical Decision Making: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

This experiment examined the effects of three elements comprising Jones' (1991) moral intensity construct, (social consensus, personal proximity, and magnitude of consequences) in a cross-cultural comparison of ethical decision making within a human resource management (HRM) context. Results indicated social consensus had the most potent effect on judgments of moral concern and judgments of immorality. An analysis of American, Eastern European, and Indonesian responses also indicted socio-cultural differences were moderated by the type of HRM ethical issue. In addition, individual differences in personal ethical ideology (relativism and idealism) varied reliably with moral judgments after controlling for issue characteristics and socio-cultural background.     

The Effect of Organizational Culture and Ethical Orientation on Accountants' Ethical Judgments

This paper examines the relationship between organizational ethical culture in two large international CPA firms, auditors' personal values and the ethical orientation that those values dictate, and judgments in ethical dilemmas typical of those that accountants face. Using an experimental task consisting of multiple judgments designed to vary in "moral intensity" (Jones, 1991), and unique as well as tried-and-true approaches to variable measurements, this study examined the judgments of more than three hundred participants in our study. ANCOVA and path analysis results indicate that: (1) Ethical judgments in situations of high moral intensity are affected by personal values and by environmental variables, such as the professional code of conduct (direct and indirect effects) and previous ethics instruction (direct effect only). (2) Corporate ethical culture, and a relatively strong firm rules-orientation, affect auditors' idealism but not relativism, and therefore indirectly affect ethical judgments. Jones' (1991) moral intensity argument is supported: differences in the characteristics of specific judgment tasks apparently result in different decision processes.     

The role of moral intensity and fairness perception in judgments of ethicality: A comparison of managerial professionals and the general public

Using a scenario approach involving hypothetical moral decisions, the study aims to (1) compare managerial professionals' ethicality judgments with those made by the general public, and (2) ascertain the roles of perceived intensity (Jones, 1991) as well as perceived fairness of the moral issue in judgments of ethicality. While the two respondent groups made similar ratings on variables of moral intensity, fairness, and ethicality; the evaluation processes underlying their ethicality judgments were different. Empirically, the study has also established a link between judgments of fairness and judgments of ethicality.M. Singer is senior lecturer in Psychology at Canterbury University, New Zealand. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology and has published widely in academic journals. Her areas of interest include decision making, work motivation, social justice and selection issues.     

How income shapes moral judgments of prosocial behavior

The current research extends past work on how consumers (as “observers”) view ethical choices made by others (“actors”). Using a person-centered approach to moral judgments, we show that consumers are judged differentially, based on their income, for engaging in certain prosocial behaviors. Nine studies demonstrate that engaging in the same prosocial behavior, such as volunteering, leads to different responses depending on whether the actor earns income versus receives government assistance. Consistent with our theorizing, we find that aid recipients are given less latitude in how they spend their time than those earning an income and are scrutinized to a greater degree for their choices because people believe their time would be better spent seeking employment. Consequently, the lower moral judgments of aid recipients who choose to volunteer (vs. income earners) are driven, at least in part, by the anger observers feel about the perceived misuse of time. Additional information or cues about employment efforts or work inability attenuate these judgments. Importantly, we document implications for support for federal spending on welfare programs.     

The influence of member heterogeneity on dyad judgment: Are two heads better than one?

An experiment is conducted to test the effect of the degree of heterogeneity in individual member judgments on the accuracy of judgments made by dyads. Predictions are made about how (1) homogeneity versus heterogeneity in judgments and (2) task instruction interact to affect a group's judgmental accuracy in average price-estimation tasks. Results indicate that dyads were not more accurate than the average dyad member or than the better member. However, increases in accuracy (relative to the accuracy of the better member of the dyad) occurred more often in dyads whose members were heterogeneous in their prior individual judgments than they did in dyads whose members were more homogeneous. When provided with instructions, heterogeneous dyads improved in accuracy to a greater degree than did homogeneous dyads.     

THE AUTOMATIC COUNTRY-OF-ORIGIN EFFECTS ON BRAND JUDGMENTS

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that country stereotypes can be spontaneously activated by the mere presence of country-of-origin (COO) information in the environment, and they may influence product judgments even when consumers do not intend to base their judgments on COO. Participants learned the attributes of a set of brands from advertisements, and categorized each brand as good or bad by using a simple attribute rule. Results indicate that the accuracy of participants' categorization decisions was influenced by their intentional use of the attribute rule and the country stereotypes that were activated automatically by COO cues presented during categorization. This study also employed the process dissociation procedure to generate quantitative estimates of the two sources of influence. The results provide converging evidence that COO effects occurred automatically and contributed to product evaluations without participants' intention or control.     

Group Decision Making with Dispersion in the Analytic Hierarchy Process

With group judgments in the context of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) one would hope for broad consensus among the decision makers. However, in practice this will not always be the case, and significant dispersion may exist among the judgments. Too much dispersion violates the principle of Pareto Optimality at the comparison level and/or matrix level, and if this happens, then the group may be homogenous in some comparisons and heterogeneous in others. The question then arises as to what would be an appropriate aggregation scheme when a consensus cannot be reached and the decision makers are either unwilling or unable to revise their judgments. In particular, the traditional aggregation via the geometric mean has been shown to be inappropriate in such situations. In this paper, we propose a new method for aggregating judgments when the raw geometric mean cannot be used. Our work is motivated by a supply chain problem of managing spare parts in the nuclear power generation sector and can be applied whenever the AHP is used with judgments from multiple decision makers. The method makes use of principal components analysis (PCA) to combine the judgments into one aggregated value for each pairwise comparison. We show that this approach is equivalent to using a weighted geometric mean with the weights obtained from the PCA.     

Same or different? How distance and variation affect similarity judgments

The effects of distance and variation on product‐category similarity judgments are examined in two studies. Distance between product categories is characterized as the mean difference in the average scores of all brands in one category with all brands in another on a comparison attribute. Variation is characterized as a degree of spread of brands along that comparison attribute. Study 1 finds that both distance and variation influence the perceived similarity of two product categories. An interaction between distance and variation is also observed. Study 2 is designed to replicate and extend these results, determining if distance and variation also affect similarity judgments when brands in the two product categories are not described by the same attribute—but instead where a comparison attribute must be abstracted. The results confirm the main effects of distance and variation. However, the interaction effects between distance and variation disappear, suggesting that subjects lose some information about distribution knowledge in the abstraction process. Both studies support consumers' use of distribution knowledge about brands (distance and variation) in product‐category similarly judgment tasks. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Management Attempts to Avoid Accounting Disclosure Oversight: The Effects of Trust and Knowledge on Corporate Directors’ Governance Ability

Management has the opportunity to promote self-serving accounting practices, such as earnings management, when management can effectively avoid oversight by the audit committee. This article investigates the effects of financial knowledge and dispositional trust on the ability of audit committee members to recognize management attempts to avoid full disclosure to the board and potentially deceive board members. The results of a controlled laboratory experiment with 40 experienced audit committee member participants indicate that: (1) Audit committee members with less financial knowledge are more likely to accept insufficient client explanations for accounting judgments than are more knowledgeable audit committee members; (2) Audit committee members with less financial knowledge are more likely to reject sufficient client explanations for accounting judgments than are more knowledgeable audit committee members; and (3) Audit committee members that place higher levels of trust in others are more likely to accept insufficient client explanations for accounting judgments than are less trusting committee members.     

Using Social Identity Theory to Predict Managers’ Emphases on Ethical and Legal Values in Judging Business Issues

The need to fill three gaps in ethics research in a business context sparked the current study. First, the distinction between the concepts of “ethical” and “legal” needs to be incorporated into theory building and empiricism. Second, a unifying theory is needed that can explain the variables that influence managers to emphasize ethics and legality in their judgments. Third, empirical evidence is needed to confirm the predictive power of the unifying theory, the discernable influence of personal and organizational variables, and the importance of the issue to the managers in determining their emphasis on the ethical and legal values of their judgments. Focused on these needs, the current research combines social identity theory with empirical findings from business ethics research. This theory building initiative framed hypothesis-driven research to investigate the influences on managers’ emphasis on ethical and legal values in making business judgments. An empirical research study was conducted involving 252 practicing managers who judged 12 newsworthy business events. Data was collected on the managers’ individual factors, on the groups that influence their judgments, and on the importance that the managers place on ethics and legality in judging the 12 scenarios. The research findings contribute to theory development (1) By successfully utilizing a blended extension of social identity and issue-contingent theories to understand managers’ judgments, and (2) By providing evidence on the relationships between the perceived importance of an issue and the emphases managers place on ethical and legal values in their judgments. The analysis of the data was extended to provide insights on the needs of employers to tailor management training on legal and ethical decision-making. The participating managers were clustered according to their emphases on Ethical Importance and Legal Importance in judging business situations. Analysis of Variance was then combined with Scheffé Multiple Comparison Tests to assess whether the factors derived from a blended extension of social identity and issue-contingent theories were significantly different across the clusters. The product of this analysis is unique sets of attributes that describe each cluster of managers, and provide an empirical basis for determining training priorities. Finally, the carefully constructed and thoroughly tested 12 research scenarios that form the core of the survey instrument enable their redeployment in subsequent research and their use by practicing executives who wish to compare data provided by their managers to results from the study participants.     

Technology and Group Decision Process in Going-Concern Judgements

Accounting and auditing practices are continually being affected by advances in technology. This study empirically examined the effect of group decision processes and technological advances on group going-concern decision making. Groups with access to group decision support systems (GDSS) were compared to groups without access to GDSS for their going-concern judgments. The results show group discussion induced auditors to be more conservative and to consider factors which may have overlooked at the individual level, though neither structure significantly reduced the considerable variance in the individual going-concern judgments. Further, as compared to their counterparts in the face-to-face discussion groups, GDSS groups indicated much higher confidence in their group's final assessment of the client's going-concern status and a higher level of satisfaction and agreement with the group decision processes. The findings suggest that while group discussions did not significantly reduce auditors' considerable variance in going-concern judgments, future research should investigate which explicit models would improve the consensus on going-concern evaluations.     

The Impact of Personal Gains on Cognitive Dissonance for Business Ethics Judgments

When managers make business ethics judgments, the decisioninevitably has impact on them. Sometimes managers reluctantly putorganizational profit as their first priority and make decisions against personal values. Howmanagers are affected by their business ethics judgments has rarely been examined. The purposeof this paper is to explore such an issue.Cognitive dissonance experienced by managers after makingbusiness ethics judgments is studied in this paper. It is hypothesized that thedegree of cognitive dissonance experienced by managers after making business ethicsjudgment is contingent upon (1) the nature of the judgment (ethical or unethical); (2)the magnitude of personal gains involved in the situation; and (3) managers' moraldevelopment.Two hundred and thirty-eight managers who attendednon-degree graduate management classes offered by a university participated in thisstudy. A business ethics situation of unfair competition with different amount of personalgains was used in this study. First, participants were asked to make a business ethicsjudgment about one of the situations. After making the judgment, cognitive dissonance andmoral development were measured for the participants. The analysis revealed thatan interaction effect was found for the three hypothesized independent variables. Generally speaking, however, the degree of cognitive dissonance experienced by managers wassignificantly affected mainly by their moral development.     

Memory-Based Store Price Judgments: The Role of Knowledge and Shopping Experience

This paper investigates the processes underlying consumers’ memory-based store price judgments. The numerosity heuristic implies that the greater the number of relatively lower priced products at a store that consumers can recall, the lower will be their overall price image of the store. That is, people use the number of recalled low-price products to judge the overall store price image. We show that this expectation holds only for knowledgeable consumers. Instead, less knowledgeable consumers use the ease with which low-price products are recalled (i.e., the availability heuristic) as a cue to make store price judgments. Therefore, the fewer low-price products they recall, the easier their recall task, and the lower their price perceptions of the store.Field studies using different manipulations tested and confirmed these predictions. Managerial implications for retailers are offered. Theoretical implications for behavioral price perceptions, memory-based judgments, and the use of heuristic cues are also discussed.     

Adjustments in performance measures: Distributive and procedural justice effects on outcome satisfaction

Adjustments for task difficulty occur regularly in performance evaluations, but their effects on satisfaction with the evaluation process has not been studied. This article reports an experiment examining the procedural and distributive justice effects of making adjustments for task difficulty in performance evaluation. Participants examined territory difficulty and sales‐volume data for a set of salespeople and rated a focal salesperson's performance. Subjects also rated their satisfaction with their performance rating and the fairness of the process. Results show that adjusting for territory (task) difficulty influences satisfaction through an intrapersonal referent effect and through procedural fairness judgments. Results also show that an intrapersonal referent effect occurs even when social‐comparison information is available; the two referents appear to have additive rather than interactive effects. Consistent with the work of van den Bos, Lind, Vermunt, and Wilkie (1997), the procedural justice effect of adjusting for territory difficulty occurs only in the absence of social‐comparison information. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.