 Complexity, novelty, and ethical judgement by entrepreneursHarvey James, Desmond Ng and Peter Klein International Journal of Entrepreneurial Venturing, 2016, vol. 8, issue 2, 170-195 Abstract: How do individual characteristics and the business environment affect the ethical judgement of entrepreneurs? We build on literatures in stakeholder and cognitive theory to examine the effects of situational complexity and novelty on an entrepreneur's ethical judgement. Our conceptual framework shows how confirmation biases and inward biases affect the ethical judgement of entrepreneurs. We test our theory using cross country data from the World Values Survey. We find that the ethical judgement of self-employed individuals is lower than that of non-entrepreneurs and that differences are moderated by the complexity and novelty of their decision setting. We also find that the ethical judgement of entrepreneurs with low levels of entrepreneurial initiative is the lowest, especially in moderately complex and novel decision settings. We argue that these findings have important implications for stakeholder approaches to entrepreneurial ethics. Keywords: entrepreneurship; ethical decision making; entrepreneurial ethics; uncertainty; cognitive bias; stakeholder theory; situational complexity; novelty; ethical judgement. (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijeven:v:8:y:2016:i:2:p:170-195 Access Statistics for this article More articles in International Journal of Entrepreneurial Venturing from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.