Moral Intensity and Ethical Decision-making: An Empirical Examination of Undergraduate Accounting and Business Students

Breda Sweeney and Fiona Costello

Accounting Education, 2009, vol. 18, issue 1, pages 75-97

Abstract: Ethical decision-making is theorised to consist of four stages: identification of an ethical dilemma, ethical judgement, ethical intentions and ethical actions. The moral intensity of the situation has been found to influence the ethical decision-making process. Using a survey consisting of four scenarios, this study examined the relationship between perceived moral intensity and the first three stages of the ethical decision-making process for undergraduate accounting and other business students. Findings showed that the nature of the ethical dilemma in the scenarios impacted on perceived moral intensity and the ethical decision-making process. Moral intensity was found to be multi-dimensional in the study and the social consensus component of moral intensity demonstrated the strongest relationship with the ethical decision-making process. Differences were found between accounting and non-accounting students, though gender was not found to be significant. Implications of the findings and areas for future research are discussed in the paper.

Keywords: Ethical decision-making; moral intensity; moral issues; ethics education (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article& ... 40C6AD35DC6213A474B5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:accted:v:18:y:2009:i:1:p:75-97

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/subscription.html

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting Education is edited by Richard M. S. Wilson

More articles in Accounting Education from Taylor and Francis Journals
Series data maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().