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This paper aims to explore the common ethical decision-making challenges faced by financial advisers and how they meet these challenges. The purpose is to identify successful decision-making tools used by investment advisers in doing business ethically. Additionally, the authors uncover common challenges and offer decision-making tools to provide support for supplemental ethics training in the future.

Questions were analyzed through a qualitative approach using individual interviews to examine a range of experiences and attitudes of active financial advisers. The sample was represented by 11 practicing financial advisers affiliated with US independent broker-dealers: six women and five men, each with 10 or more years of experience, ranging in age from 35 to 75. Grounded in four ethical decision-making models, this research examines individual ethical decision-making using individual (internal, personal) and organizational (external, situational) factors.

The method used uncovered struggles and revealed strategies used in making ethical decisions. Two research questions were examined: what are the common ethical decision-making challenges faced by financial advisers in the US financial industry? How do financial advisers handle ethical decision-making challenges? Four themes emerged that impacted ethical decision-making: needs of the individual, needs of others, needs of the firm and needs of the marketplace. Financial advisers identified moral obligation, self-control and consulting with others as major considerations when they contemplate difficult decisions.

A limitation of this review is its small sample size. A more robust sample size from investment advisers with a broader range of experiences could have widened the findings from the study.

Investment advisers can use the findings of this study as a tool for improving their own ethical decision-making or designing training for their employees to be better decision-makers.

The study explores the decision-making experiences of investment advisers to reveal multifaceted, often private struggles that qualitative methods can uncover. The study provides support for the development of additional training in ethical decision-making specific to investment advisers.

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 develop a model of ethical decision-making that applies to accountants and the accounting profession.

This model is an integration of five factors that influence ethical decision-making by accountants: professional codes of conduct; philosophical orientation; religious orientation; culturally derived values; and moral maturity.

This model is a synthesis of previous identified factors that influence ethical decision-making and incorporates them into a model that is specific to professional accountants.

The authors develop a set of propositions and explain how this model can be tested and its implications for both the accounting profession and the teaching of business ethics.

This model presents a new way of viewing ethical decision-making by accountants that is predicated on the importance of professional codes of conduct that influence both behaviour and decision-making. The external certification of professional accountants provides a layer of accountability not previously incorporated into ethical decision-making models.

Lawrence Kohlberg's (1969) concept of cognitive moral development (CMD) has been one of the most investigated constructs in the field of social psychology, with over one thousand studies reported investigating this construct in only two decades of research. However, what is the relationship of this theoretical construct to actual decision making and behavior? Blasi (1980, p. 4) opined for the criticality of moral judgement research to both ethical decision making and ethical inquiry, stating that “without judgement, an action, no matter how beneficial, would not be moral.” Relating Kohlberg's model to business decision making and behavior has been central to the building of theoretical frameworks of the ethical decision making process engaged in by individuals. The models of this process proposed by Trevino and Youngblood (1990), Trevino (1986), Bommer, Gratto, Gravender, and Tuttle (1987), Ferrell and Gresham (1985), Ferrell, Gresham, and Fraedrich (1989), Swinyard, DeLong, and Cheng (1989), and Jones (1991) all contained cognitive moral development as a factor in their respective models of ethical decision making.

The paper seeks to evaluate the prescriptive value of ethical decision‐making models.

The paper explores various types of models in the ethics literature in concert with knowledge from the decision sciences literature to develop a tentative list of evaluative criteria that might be applied to prescriptive models. It then applies these criteria to one prescriptive model from the ethics literature, developed by Petrick and Quinn, in an attempt to demonstrate the value of more comprehensive evaluation. It closes by considering future research aimed at the evaluation of ethical decision‐making models as well as research needed to validate the Petrick and Quinn model.

This critique finds that the Petrick‐Quinn judgment integrity model satisfies most of the criteria discussed in the ethical decision‐making literature. The primary opportunities for refining the Petrick‐Quinn model as a prescriptive framework for ethical decision making are: articulating the operational judgment component of the model as a formal, quantitative decision analysis, and conducting research to assess the real‐world utility of the model.

While there has been a proliferation of research concerning business ethics, little attention has been focused on evaluating the utility of ethical decision‐making models. Accordingly, this paper advances theory, research and practice regarding ethical decision making in organizations.

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.

This paper aims to examine the influence of ethical judgement on decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues of Islamic banking practitioners in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The study adopted a confirmatory approach in which validated/established “normative ethical standards” are taken into the consideration as theoretical underpinning. In total, 262 samples are collected from Islamic banking practitioners in the UAE and data analysis is conducted using structural equation modelling.

The empirical findings indicate that the decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues of Islamic banking practitioners in UAE does not adhere to any set of normative ethical standards and respondents are pragmatic in nature when it comes to the decision-making behaviour related to ethical matters.

The study elucidates to what extent Islamic banking practitioners have encountered themselves with situations that demand the proper attention to the ethical aspects, which affecting decision-making behaviour related to ethical issues. According to the findings, those situations considerably demand the attention of ethical judgement in the decision-making behaviour of Islamic banking practitioners. Hence, it is recommended for Islamic banks in UAE to contain or intensify the training on the importance of ethics, Islamic thought and worldview to enhance corporate decision-making and banking profitability within the purview of Islamic principles.

While ample emphasis has been given to the juristic (fiqh) aspects of Sharīʿah-compliant in Islamic banking and finance, relatively little has been attempted to explore its ethical dimensions (akhlaq) in the compliance parameters. Further, Sharīʿah-compliant has been product-centric rather than people-centric. While there is numerous literature documented that links ethics and Islamic banking and finance, ethical framework and practice in Islamic finance institutions, studies focusing on the “people” and their “ethical decision-making behaviour” in Islamic financial institutions found missing in the literature. These gaps serve as justification for undertaking this research.

This paper aims to investigate the role of affect and tolerance of ambiguity on ethical decision-making of management and accounting students.

Weisbrod’s (2009) questionnaire on ethical decision-making in individual and organizational situations, McDonald’s (1970)16-factor questionnaire on tolerance of ambiguity and Watson et al.’s (1988) Positive and Negative Affect Schedule were used to study the students’ views toward research hypotheses. The population used in this study includes graduate and PhD students of accounting and management during the academic year 2014-2015. The number of samples is 398 and sample members selected using simple random sampling method. Hypotheses test using structural equation modeling in the AMOS software version 18.

Results of hypotheses shows that individual characteristics of positive and negative affect and tolerance of ambiguity have no effect on accounting students’ ethical decision-making, but there is a significant positive relationship between management students’ negative affect and ethical decision-making, and a significant negative relationship between management students’ increased level of tolerance of ambiguity and ethical decision-making. The findings also show that affect (positive and negative) and tolerance of ambiguity have no interactive effect on accounting students’ ethical decision-making, whereas among students of management, there is a significant relationship between interactive effect of negative affect and tolerance of ambiguity on ethical decision-making. The results show that there is a significant difference between students of management and accounting based on negative effects and tolerance of ambiguity on ethical decision-making.

The current paper is almost the first paper which was conducted in developing countries.

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 present a synthesized conceptual model for ethical decision-making in marketing that accommodates both humanistic and religious aspects.

A religious–humanistic approach is adopted on synthesizing. “Ferrell and Gresham’s (1985) contingency framework for ethical decision-making in marketing” and “Al-Ghazali’s ethical philosophy” are considered to be the theoretical base for the synthesized model.

Al-Ghazali’s ethical philosophy that stands for the religious dimension in this study was found appropriate for incorporating into the Ferrell and Gresham contingency framework for ethical decision-making in marketing. The approach (religious-humanistic) adopted for synthesizing the two aspects into one model was justified accordingly.

A newly synthesized model is only conceptually validated. Statistical validity is required based on the variables included in the conceptual model. Future studies are recommended to attain the model fit.

The scale and model developed in the study should help the marketing-department authorities to assess and evaluate ethical aspects of existing individuals in the organization and potential candidates under the selection stage for employment. The research output derived by way of using the newly synthesized conceptual model should be able to pave the way for more in-depth research on actual ethical practices of “marketing practitioners” in the organization. To some extent, understanding of ethical standing of employees should help in improving efficiency and reduce costs from unethical behaviour. This should be able to improve governance from the top- to the lower-level management.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no literature has conceptualized a model that accommodates both materialistic and religious aspects into a single model to explain ethical decision-making of individuals in organizations. This is an initial and a humble attempt to conceptualize a model that incorporates ethical philosophy in Islam, with special reference to Al-Ghazali’s ethical philosophy.