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Focusing on ethical issues when making organizational decisions should encourage a variety of positive outcomes for companies and their employees. The purpose of this paper is to determine the degree to which data-based ethical decision making, lateral relations and organizational commitment are interrelated in organizations.

Data were collected from business professionals employed at multiple locations of a financial services firm operating in the USA. Mediation analysis (based on structural equation modeling) was used to test the proposed relationships.

Results indicated that employees’ perceptions of data-based ethical decision making were positively related to perceived lateral relations, and that perceived lateral relations were positively related to organizational commitment.

Given that information was collected using only a self-report questionnaire, common method bias could be an issue. In addition, the study’s cross-sectional design limits conclusions about causality. Another limitation involves the study’s homogenous sample, which decreases the generalizability of the findings. Finally, variable responses could have been impacted by individual frames of reference and other perceptual differences.

Results suggest that information flow enhancements should support or be consistent with horizontal information flow enhancements, and that together these factors should increase employee commitment.

Given the dearth of existing research, this interdisciplinary investigation is important because it fills gaps in the management literature. This study is also important because the results could inform decisions regarding the use of data analysis in ethical decisions and lateral forms of organizational structuring to improve work attitudes.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an interdisciplinary review of the existing research on ethical behavior – informed by philosophical theories, social sciences, and applied business research – and identifies the merits and limitations of the extant theories, including the applicability of prescriptive frameworks and models to business practice.

Following the review, the paper advances a descriptive model of ethical decision‐making criteria that elucidates how individual, organizational, and environmental variables interact to influence attitude formation across critical components of an ethical issue.

The model advanced expands upon other existing frameworks and provides a comprehensive and simultaneous assessment of the interplay between individual‐level variables (e.g. demographic variables, position in the organisation), the structure and climate of the organisation in which the decisions are made, and the social and political features of the business environment.

The proposed model can be used as a training tool and it holds several advantages over the extant alternatives, namely versatility (it is adaptable to the specific organizational context in which respondents are required to conceptualize the dilemma and generate courses of action), and scope (the model allows for the simultaneous assessment of a myriad of cross‐level variables).

The paper offers a comprehensive decision‐making model that can be used to examine ethical decisions in business settings, to investigate potential differences in decision‐making accuracy and ethical reasoning between groups and individuals, and to examine the impact of changing ethical climates in organizational strategy.

Recent years have brought significant advances in research on behavioral ethics. However, research on ethical decision making is still in a nascent stage. Our objective in this paper is twofold: First, we argue that the practice of mindfulness may have significant positive effects on ethical decision making in organizations. More specifically, we will discuss the benefits of “reperceiving” – a meta-mechanism in the practice of mindfulness for ethical decision making and we provide an overview of mindfulness research pertaining to ethical decision making. Subsequently, we explore areas in which neuroscience research may inform research on ethics in organizations. We conclude that both neuroscience and mindfulness offer considerable promise to the field of ethical decision making.

The purpose of this paper is to use Ferrell and Gresham (1985) contingency model to examine the impact of situational factors on decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues of Islamic banking practitioners.

A total of 262 samples are collected from Islamic banking practitioners in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and data analysis is conducted using structural equation modelling (SEM) with a confirmatory approach.

The empirical findings indicate that decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues of Islamic banking practitioners is significantly influenced in the process of interacting with persons who are part of the organisation, and these influences are determined by the intra-organisational distance and legitimate authority between the individuals and the focal person. Further, it is also empirically verified that decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues of Islamic banking practitioners is significantly influenced by the presence and/or absence of the opportunity factors such as corporate policies, professional codes of ethics and rewards/punishment system that prevails in the organisation.

Coverage of respondents in this study limited to single country, and the scope is limited to the model that adopted in the study.

It is recommended that respective authorities should have proper control over situational factors (i.e. significant others and opportunity factors) in organisations by encouraging ethical actions so that individuals are learned and influenced by each other and reviewing and improving existing corporate policies, professional codes of ethics and rewards/punishment system that limit the barrier and provide recompenses to the individuals in the organisation.

While the literature has presented the connection between ethics and Islamic banking, they failed to address ethical decision-making in Islamic financial institutions (IFIs). Hence, the empirical findings provide insights towards understanding organisational decision-making behaviour that to enhance governance.

This paper aims to identify ethical challenges of using artificial intelligence (AI)-based accounting systems for decision-making and discusses its findings based on Rest's four-component model of antecedents for ethical decision-making. This study derives implications for accounting and auditing scholars and practitioners.

This research is rooted in the hermeneutics tradition of interpretative accounting research, in which the reader and the texts engage in a form of dialogue. To substantiate this dialogue, the authors conduct a theoretically informed, narrative (semi-systematic) literature review spanning the years 2015–2020. This review's narrative is driven by the depicted contexts and the accounting/auditing practices found in selected articles are used as sample instead of the research or methods.

In the thematic coding of the selected papers the authors identify five major ethical challenges of AI-based decision-making in accounting: objectivity, privacy, transparency, accountability and trustworthiness. Using Rest's component model of antecedents for ethical decision-making as a stable framework for our structure, the authors critically discuss the challenges and their relevance for a future human–machine collaboration within varying agency between humans and AI.

This paper contributes to the literature on accounting as a subjectivising as well as mediating practice in a socio-material context. It does so by providing a solid base of arguments that AI alone, despite its enabling and mediating role in accounting, cannot make ethical accounting decisions because it lacks the necessary preconditions in terms of Rest's model of antecedents. What is more, as AI is bound to pre-set goals and subjected to human made conditions despite its autonomous learning and adaptive practices, it lacks true agency. As a consequence, accountability needs to be shared between humans and AI. The authors suggest that related governance as well as internal and external auditing processes need to be adapted in terms of skills and awareness to ensure an ethical AI-based decision-making.

This paper aims to understand how accountants in Sri Lanka perceive the effect of religiosity on ethical decision-making. Sri Lanka is a highly religious country, but it also has a high level of corruption, so understanding ethical decision-making in this context is important for the accounting profession.

Data were collected using semi-structured interviews with 40 accountants in Sri Lanka with decision-making roles. Virtue ethics theory and content analysis were used to analyse the interview data and categorise accountants' responses into themes using an interpretive methodology.

This paper identifies three ways in which religiosity can influence accountants’ ethical decision-making. Firstly, through a faith in the beliefs of their religion; secondly, through awareness of religious prescriptions and virtues; and thirdly, through a commitment towards religious practices and rituals. However, the findings show that religiosity does not always influence the ethical decision-making of accountants because of pervasive corruption, which is a cultural norm in contemporary Sri Lanka. Thus, it is evident that there is an interrelationship between religious and cultural environments which can influence ethical decision-making.

While the religiosity of accountants can support ethical decision-making, the findings of this paper show that the cultural norm of corruption can mediate this connection as the evidence shows that accountants with a strong religious background, irrespective of their religion, may still act unethically when corruption is a cultural norm.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether Hofstede’s cultural dimensions have a significant relationship with ethical decision-making among tax practitioners while performing their duties in ensuring tax compliance among taxpayers.

A structured questionnaire was used to collect data from tax practitioners in the state of Terengganu, Malaysia. Two hundred questionnaires were distributed via Google Forms and email to tax practitioners who were selected from the Inland Revenue Board of Malaysia website using a mixture of systematic random and snowball sampling approaches. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences software program was used to analyse the collected data.

The results show that power distance (PD), individualism (IND) and uncertainty avoidance (UAV) have a significant relationship with ethical decision-making, whereas masculinity (MAS) has no significant relationship with ethical decision-making among tax practitioners while carrying out their duties. The positive relationship of PD and of IND with decision-making behaviour indicates that ethical decision-making is highly practised in a low PD and low IND culture rather than in a high PD and high IND culture. In contrast, UAV shows a negative beta sign, which indicates that tax practitioners tend to practise ethical decision-making in a high UAV culture.

This study fills a gap in the literature in regard to the influence of culture on tax compliance particularly among tax practitioners in Malaysia. The study shows how culture is related to the decision-making practices of tax practitioners while performing their role as an intermediary between their clients and the government. It is worthwhile to examine the decision-making of tax practitioners because the results of such an examination not only provide some insights into the professional practices of accountants that will be of interest to the relevant authorities such as the Malaysian Institute of Accountants, they also offer some information that will be of assistance to higher learning institutions in formulating accounting programmes to produce the future generation of accountants.

While the problem of unethical leadership is undoubtedly a global one, the urgency of generating ethical leadership to advance the development of Africa has never been more evident than it is today. The challenge for higher education in developing ethical leaders is of core importance, as it is responsible for providing the main recruiting ground of business leaders. The current paper reports findings of a qualitative study of postgraduate students’ ethical development at the end of courses in business ethics aimed to enhance moral reasoning and ethical decision-making. The paper aims to ascertain whether stand-alone ethics courses are more effective than integrated ones in achieving academic ethical competency.

The study adopts an idiographic approach which aims at eliciting individual student subjective perceptions of the effects of the direct and indirect courses of ethical instruction on their moral reasoning and ethical practice. The research design broadly follows Mill’s (2017) method of difference.

Findings indicate perceived differences in the relative effectiveness of stand-alone and embedded ethics courses among students but also show that most students hold positive overall evaluations of the effectiveness of the both types of ethics instruction.

Limitations to the study include that it is cross-sectional, involves a small sample of postgraduate students and is restricted to two management courses at one institution of higher learning. Furthermore, while Mill (2017) provides a useful research design in this context, it is not able to indicate causality, as there are other possible unidentified “third variables” that may be the actual cause of student differences between embedded and stand-alone ethics courses. The study is not able to show the durability and transfer of ethical competencies into students’ later working lives.

The study provides a useful practical educational contribution to the extant knowledge in the field in that it suggests that ethical courses aimed at giving students a moral reasoning “toolkit” for ethical decision-making are more effective when delivered in the stand-alone format, whereas practical decision-making skills are best honed by embedded business ethics courses.

The problem of corruption in business and politics in South Africa is widely documented and has been regarded as responsible for creating a serious developmental drag on the alleviation of poverty and quality of lives of the majority of people in the country. The moral/ethical competency and behavior of future business leaders is partly the responsibility of institutions of higher learning. The study aims to find the most effective means of imparting moral awareness in postgraduate students who are likely to take up business leadership positions in their future careers.

The study provides useful contribution to the extant knowledge in the field in the African context in that it suggests that ethical courses aimed at giving students a moral reasoning “toolkit” for ethical decision-making are more effective when delivered in the stand-alone format, whereas practical decision-making skills are best honed by embedded business ethics courses.

This paper aims to seek to develop and validate the scale for organizational decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues, which addresses the issue of framing the dependent variable in a dichotomous way in organizational ethical decision-making (EDM) models and complementing the inter-variable circular causality model within the purview of Islamic banking with Quranic orientations.

This study adopted both exploratory and confirmatory approaches. A total of 362 responses were collected from banking practitioners in the United Arab Emirates using a self-administered questionnaire. Content validity test (CVT) and factor analysis were used to refine measurement items and define as well as validate the scale, respectively. Further, the validated factors/scales were tested using the theoretical underpinning of the inter-variable circular causality model with Quranic orientations.

CVT refined the measurement items, and it enhanced the qualitative aspect of the proposed scale. Total three dimensions extracted, i.e. “awareness,” “attitude” and “standards” through exploratory factor analysis and evidence of validation of measurement scale/construct reported through confirmatory factor analysis. Further, a significant inter-variable circular causal relationship was found among the validated dimensions and analysed with an Islamic perspective.

Study constraints the population into a single industry and a single country. Future studies are suggested to use the newly developed scale/construct in decision-making models and obtain the overall model fit by considering population from diversified organizations and multi countries.

Comprehensibility of organizational behaviour has always been critical for the efficient functioning of organizations, especially where the situation involves ethical concerns. The proposed scale can be used as a tool to assess the organizational decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues, particularly where the studies intended to examine the determinants of organizational decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues through decision-making models.

While there is ample literature attempted to examine the organizational EDM, particularly on evaluating determinants of EDM, the majority of the studies have failed to frame the dependent variable of the EDM models adopted for the study in such a manner that is in line with the objective of the study. Although some of the literature suggest the theoretical aspects to address this issue, to date, no work has been done that attempted to develop and validate the scale for the theoretical aspects recommended and confirm with the inter-variable circular causality model. These serve as justification for undertaking this study.

The purpose of this paper is to characterize issues related to head nurses’ decision making when managing ethical dilemmas.

The study is qualitative descriptive, in which researchers stay close to the data. The data were collected in the format of unstructured written reflections. Inductive conventional latent qualitative content analysis was applied to the data.

The issues of head nurses’ management of decision making in ethical dilemmas relate to the following aspects: taking risks in deviating from the formalities, balancing power and humaneness, maintaining the professional hierarchy, managing resistance to change, managing with limited options, and experiencing the decline of nurse’s professional and/or human dignity.

Reflections in written form were preferred to semi-structured interviews and the researchers were unable to contact the participants directly and to ask additional questions. All the reflections were produced in a language other than English.

The issues of head nurses’ management of decision making in ethical dilemmas reveal the gap between societal expectations and the opportunities to improve nursing leadership in health care organizations.

The issues of head nurses’ decision making when managing ethical dilemmas are related to contexts that reflect the attitudes of society and health care system toward nursing management.

The study adds to the understanding of issues of the management of decision making in ethical dilemmas. It is an ongoing systematic process that encourages head nurses to learn from practice and manage the quality of care by empowering themselves and nurses to take responsibility for leadership.