Are There Gender Differences When Professional Accountants Evaluate Moral Intensity for Earnings Management?

Tara Shawver () and Lynn Clements ()

Journal of Business Ethics, 2015, vol. 131, issue 3, 557-566

Abstract: Gender differences in ethical evaluations may vary across types of behaviors. This controlled experiment explores gender differences in ethical evaluations, moral judgment, moral intentions, and moral intensity evaluations by surveying a group of professional accountants to elicit their views on a common earnings management technique. We find that there are no significant differences between male and female professional accountants when they make an ethical evaluation involving earnings management by shipping product early to meet a quarterly bonus. Both male and female professional accountants made a similar moral judgment that this action should not be completed and indicated similar moral intentions to report this type of behavior. Further, we find that male and female professional accountants made similar moral intensity evaluations when product is shipped early to meet a quarterly bonus. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords: Accounting ethics; Ethical evaluations; Moral judgment; Moral intensity; Gender (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10551-014-2293-6 (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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:131:y:2015:i:3:p:557-566

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-014-2293-6

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().