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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the influence of moral philosophy on the ethical beliefs of auditors. The paper argues that an individual's moral philosophy is the key factor in how one views ethical issues and largely determines the ethical choices one makes. The paper also seeks to discover the influence of personal values on the reasoning processes associated with ethics and to explore whether the personal value preferences of auditors, as a manifestation of their moral philosophy, influence their ethical beliefs and (presumably) their subsequent actions.

The authors designed a survey instrument to assess the value preferences, moral philosophies, and reactions of practicing auditors to judgment dilemmas. They then employed structural equation modeling to examine the sensitivity of auditors to the competence and integrity of clients with the aim of gaining insight into the ethical beliefs of auditors in general.

These results show that value preferences alone fail as predictors of ethical beliefs. Instead, personal values have an indirect influence on ethical beliefs via moral philosophy. Moreover, auditors strongly motivated by values based on self‐enhancement were negatively associated with idealism in ethics and positively associated with relativism. Therefore, it can be concluded that idealist auditors were more likely to condemn the actions of clients that violated moral norms, while relativist auditors were more permissive.

The results identify the role of moral philosophy as a mediator for the personal values and ethical beliefs of auditors, shedding light on how personal values can influence ethical sensitivity.

Ethical decisions determine which individuals and/or groups benefit, and which suffer. Such decisions by executives impact front-line providers directly and customers indirectly; they are important because repercussions in service interactions feel personal. The purpose of this paper is to fill an important gap in the service literature by exploring how high-level executives make ethical decisions, creating values and culture within an organization; the results include testable propositions.

The research used a grounded theory approach, wherein high-level executives in successful service organizations responded through in-depth interviews. Complete interview transcripts were analyzed using standard qualitative methodology, including open coding to better understand and categorize the data, axial coding to seek out crucial relationships between concepts, and selective coding to develop research propositions.

Data analysis revealed two groups of interviewees, one more outcome-oriented in decision making and the other more process-oriented. The organizations led by more outcome-oriented executives have strong family-like (or paternalistic) cultures, whereas the organizations led by more process-oriented executives value adaptability and diversity.

The executives interviewed are quite successful; therefore, it is not possible to make inferences about unsuccessful executives or those leading poorly performing organizations. Propositions developed relate that process-oriented executives use both analytical measures and intuition in decision making, whereas outcome-oriented respondents rely more heavily on analytical measures.

Service executives apparently make ethical decisions while focusing either on processes or on outcomes; members of these two groups use different evaluative criteria to identify a successful decision. Decisions relating to people within the organization are perceived by the executives to be especially salient, apparently owing to interpersonal interaction in services.

There are inherent social implications when ethical decisions are made, because these decisions determine which individuals or groups benefit, and which suffer.

This research is among the first to interview high-level service executives about their ethical decision making when their choices define culture and values within their organizations. Findings offer a new look at how differences between executives that focus on processes and those that focus on outcomes may shape organizational cultures and lead to consideration of different criteria in making and evaluating decisions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influence of personal and moral intensity variables on specific processes, namely, ethical recognition, ethical judgment and ethical intention, involved in the ethical decision making (EDM) of accounting professionals.

A structured questionnaire containing four vignettes of ethical dilemmas is used in the paper to obtain data from 329 accounting professionals. The data are analyzed using Pearson correlation matrix, independent sample t-test, one-way analyses of variance and multiple regression estimation techniques.

The findings of the paper suggest that age, economic status, upbringing, moral idealism and relativism, magnitude of consequence and social consensus are significant determinants of the EDM process of accounting professionals.

The paper provides evidence to guide accounting regulatory bodies on ways to strengthen extant measures that ensure strict compliance with ethics codes among accounting professionals in Nigeria.

The paper provides support for Kohlberg’s cognitive reasoning and moral development theory and Rest’s EDM theoretical model, which will aid the development of a structured curriculum for accounting ethics instruction in Nigeria, as hitherto, there is yet to be a provision for a stand-alone ethics course in the undergraduate accounting programs in Nigeria.

This research looks at the main effect of individuals’ moral philosophies, idealism and relativism, and its impact on the four dimensions of the consumer ethics beliefs – active benefit, passive benefit, no harm and doing good. The moderating impact of two dominant personalities – Machiavellianism and narcissism – was also analyzed. Based on Hunt–Vitell theory of ethics, this study aims to propose that there is a positive and significant impact of more relativistic and less idealistic moral philosophies on the decreased consumer ethical perceptions and that the narcissistic/Machiavellian personality traits drive that effect.

A total of 497 survey respondents were recruited via an online platform. All respondents were asked to answer questions, which were divided into four major parts. The first part consisted of scales related to both moral philosophies, the second part had both dark personality scales, the third part questioned about their consumer ethical beliefs and the final part was related to consumer demographics.

Relativists had higher scores in three consumer unethical belief dimensions. Idealists were not supportive of the active and passive illegal activities, as did their positive relation with doing good aspect of the ethical beliefs. Machiavellians strengthen the positive relativism relationship. The idealistic relation of narcissists, compared to relativistic relation, is stronger on unethical decision-making for consumers.

This study contributes to the current knowledge of individual’s moral philosophies and their impact on consumer ethical beliefs. It further demonstrates how the dark personalities of narcissism and Machiavellianism drive the relationship.

Given system‐wide lapses in moral decision making in large US corporations and the inherited corruption from formerly planned economies, the development of moral reasoning is an important issue for business educators in the USA and Latvia. The purpose of this paper is to present a comparison of Latvian and US business persons.

Kohlberg's et al., theory of cognitive moral development (CMD), as operationalized by Rest as framework to study the antecedents of moral judgment in both lands. Survey data from 340 employed MBA students as a proxy for current and future business leaders are used. A total of 18 scenarios are reduced to four unique components, which are regressed on measures of CMD, Country of Respondent, and Moral Philosophy to test three hypotheses. Gender and age are added as controls.

CMD and Country of Respondent are strongly associated with increased moral judgment, while Moral Philosophy is less influential. In addition, the positive functional relationship between CMD and moral judgment exists in both countries but at lesser absolute values in Latvia. Findings also suggest that the efficacy of the independent variables varies with the issues at hand. Interestingly, moral dilemmas concerned with marketing strategies appear to be immune from moral reasoning. This indirectly gives support to Jones' concept of moral intensity and future research may wish to continue this line of inquiry as well as expand the comparison to other European Union countries.

The paper is the first to use the defining issues test to study levels of CMD in the Latvian business community.

A recent article pointed out that “past research has paid relatively little attention to the sources of individuals’ moral philosophies from either a conceptual or an empirical standpoint” and investigated the determinants of idealism and relativism among American marketers. A literature review indicates that there is even less theoretical and empirical cross‐cultural investigation of moral philosophies. As more and more companies are expanding into foreign markets, problems related to cross‐national ethics and social responsibility are becoming increasingly prevalent. Therefore, this study proposes a framework explaining the differences in the idealism and relativism of American, Malaysian, and Australian marketers based on: country differences (cultural differences and differences in economic and legal/political environment); corporate ethical values; and gender and age of the marketer. Results indicate that there are differences in the level of idealism and relativism exhibited by marketers from the three countries. Irrespective of country, corporate ethical values are positively related to the idealism and negatively related to the relativism of marketers. Also, irrespective of country, women are more idealistic than men, and relativism increases with age. Implications are offered and avenues for future research suggested.

Given the ever‐increasing globalization of economies, growing numbers of marketing firms are expecting more of their profits to be derived from international sales. Global competition is ferocious; thus, developing long‐term partner relationships often becomes a significant competitive advantage. Corporate ethics are of pivotal importance in global business, though globalization also complicates ethical questions, because an individual’s culture affects his/her ethical decision making. Failures to account for the effects of differences in consumers’ culturally‐based ethical values will hinder a marketer’s efforts to expand internationally. Compares consumers from Malaysia and the USA in terms of their perceptions of marketing ethics situations, their attitudes toward business and salespeople, and their personal moral philosophies. The survey results reveal some significant differences between the consumers from these two countries.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model of the role managers and peers play in shaping salespeople's ethical behaviour. The model specifies that sales manager personal moral philosophies, whether sales managers themselves are rewarded according to the outcomes or behaviours of their salespeople, sales team job security, intra‐team cooperation, and sales team tactical performance all influence sales team ethical standards. In turn, ethical standards influence the probability that sales team members will behave (un)ethically when faced with ethical dilemmas.

The model is tested on a sample of 154 Finnish sales managers. Data were collected via mail survey. Analysis was undertaken using structural equation modelling.

Ethical standards appear to be shaped by several factors; behaviour‐based management controls increase ethical standards, relativist managers tend to manage less ethically‐minded sales teams, job insecurity impedes the development of ethical standards, and sales teams' cooperation activity increases ethical standards. Sales teams are less likely to engage in unethical behaviour when the teams have strong ethical standards.

Cross‐sectional data limits generalisability; single country data may limit the ability to generalise to different sales environments; additional measure development is needed; identification of additional antecedent factors would be beneficial.

Sales managers should consciously develop high ethical standards in sales teams if they wish to reduce unethical behaviour. Ethical standards can be improved if sales managers change their own outward behaviour (exhibit a less relativistic ethical philosophy), foster cooperation amongst salespeople, and develop perceptions of job security. How sales managers are rewarded may shape how they approach the management of ethical behaviour in their sales teams.

This paper appears to be the first to simultaneously examine both sales manager‐specific and sales team‐specific antecedents to sales team ethical standards and behaviours. As such, it provides an important base for research in this critical area.

This study explores the influence individual characteristics identified in prior research have on ethical choice in a financial reporting task. An action-based, multi-metric dependent variable is developed to measure ethical reporting choice. Intermediate accounting students participate in the task as part of a curricular assignment in a revenue recognition module. Results demonstrate that several, but not all, individual characteristics found in prior research do influence accounting students’ ethical revenue recognition choices. Specifically, the external locus-of-control, idealism, consequentialist, and Machiavellian characteristics are found to influence ethical reporting choice.

This study aims to examine the ethical beliefs and moral philosophical typologies, the relative effect of religiosity on personal ethical beliefs and behavior of the collectivist and individualistic business executives.

This research assesses the relative impact of significant cultural factors on the business ethical decision-making process in a Western and individualistic cultural context (the USA) in comparison to a non-Western and collective cultural context (Morocco). To understand how cultural variations influence business ethical practices, this study adopts Hofstede’s cultural framework for comparison of business executives’ ethical decisions within a cross-cultural context. Hypotheses are tested on survey data on 172 business executives.

Results show that most collective business executives are “Situationists”. The findings reveal a strong, positive relationship between business managers’ religiosity and their idealism degrees. This study also reveals mixed findings in examining the correlation of religiosity with various components of ethical intentions.

The link between religiosity and ethical intentions needs to be viewed with caution. This calls for expanding the scope of this study into other cultures and religions.

Differences of the findings in ethical typologies between collective and individualistic business executives may lead to different negotiation styles on ethical business decisions and issues. Managers from a collective culture are not as likely to exhibit much change in their initial ethical orientation(s). There is a strong positive relationship between a business manager’s religiosity and his/her degree of idealism. Thus, the more religious business managers are, the more Absolutist they are when making ethical and moral judgments.

This research works to fill the gap by examining the impact of culture on the business/marketing ethical decision-making processes within the contexts of a Western cultural and developed nation and a non-Western cultural, and developing/Mediterranean/North African nation. The findings clarify the influence of culture on business ethical decisions. Such an understanding can assist corporate managers in developing and successfully implementing business ethical codes that lead to enhanced moral conduct in their organizations.