Linking moral judgement and moral intensity to ethical decision-making : a cross-cultural analysis

Ballantine, Paul W.

Abstract

This study explored the effects of moral judgement, moral intensity, and culture on ethical decision-making behaviour using data collected from students attending universities in Malaysia, Morocco, and New Zealand. The three samples which were investigated in this study consisted of 55 Malaysian, 102 Moroccan, and 105 New Zealand commerce students. The results of this study indicated that level of moral judgement was not consistently related to subjects' ethical intentions. However, Jones' (1991) moral intensity construct was found to be a consistently significant predictor of ethical intentions, in addition to providing explanatory power of subjects' ethical intentions over that already provided by their level of moral judgement. It was also discovered that culture had a significant, although inconsistent effect upon perceptions of moral intensity. The implications of these findings are discussed, along with directions for future research within the field of business ethics.

Keywords

cognitive moral development; level of moral judgement; moral intensity; ethical decision-making; ethical intentions; culture; business ethics; human behaviour; ethics

Date

1998

Type

Thesis

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