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, 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
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09639280802009454 (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:taf:accted:v:18:y:2009:i:1:p:75-97

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RAED20

DOI: 10.1080/09639280802009454

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting Education is currently edited by Richard Wilson

More articles in Accounting Education from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().