Moral judgment in a business setting: The role of managers’ moral foundation, ideology, and level of moral development

Fuan Li (), Mike Chen-ho Chao (), Nancy Yi-feng Chen () and Sixue Zhang ()
Additional contact information
Fuan Li: William Paterson University of New Jersey
Mike Chen-ho Chao: William Paterson University of New Jersey
Nancy Yi-feng Chen: Lingnan University
Sixue Zhang: University of International Business and Economics

Asia Pacific Journal of Management, 2018, vol. 35, issue 1, No 6, 143 pages

Abstract: Abstract Despite the extensive research conducted on moral judgment, the role of moral foundations in moral judgment in business has largely been overlooked. Motivated by the increasing concern about the ethical issues observed in China, this study aims to examine the impact of moral foundations on Chinese managers’ moral judgment while simultaneously looking into the role of moral ideology and the level of managers’ moral development. A sample survey was conducted in Shanghai, China, which involved 451 practicing business managers who were pursuing their MBA degree in a nearby university at the time of data collection. Both structural equation modeling (SEM) and hierarchical regression were used in data analyses. The results reveal that individualizing moral foundations and moral idealism have significant positive impacts on moral judgment. Moreover, the findings indicate that moral relativism and levels of mangers’ moral development moderate the relationship between individualizing moral foundations and moral judgment with the impact of individualizing moral foundations being stronger when managers’ relativism is low rather high or when their moral development is high than it is low. The managerial implications of the research and future research direction are discussed.

Keywords: Moral judgment; Moral foundation; Relativism; Idealism; Moral development; Business ethics in China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10490-017-9529-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:asiapa:v:35:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s10490-017-9529-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/10490/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10490-017-9529-9

Access Statistics for this article

Asia Pacific Journal of Management is currently edited by Jane Lu

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