Content area
Full Text
Ethical decision making is a topic of great interest in the literature of business ethics. A number of authors have proposed a variety of theoretical models in the effort to explain and predict the process by which a manager makes an ethical decision. These range from the situational-individual interaction model of Trevino (1986) to the contingency framework of Ferrell and Gresham (1985) to the moral intensity model of Jones (1991). While any of these models might serve as a basis for undertaking empirical study of the ethical decision process, there is surprisingly limited effort directed toward theory testing (Randall and Gibson, 1990). Indeed, most of the writing on this topic has been nonempirical (Trevino, 1986). The paucity of empirical research grounded on theory has substantially impeded the development of the field.
The purpose of this article is to examine the available empirical literature on ethical decision making. By reviewing the extent to which empirical work supports or refutes the ethical decision making models, it will be possible to better understand the extent to which these models are predictive and descriptive of an individual's ethical decision behavior. Further, it will be possible to identify the factors that have been found associated with such behavior and those factors that are not. It is not our purpose to propose another model of ethical decision making behavior but rather to rely on those already developed to identify those factors which merit further study. Thus, the contribution of this paper is to organize the available empirical information in order to see what we know and need to know about the factors which are hypothesized as determinants of ethical decision behavior.
In general, the ethical decision making models divide the postulated influences on an individual's decision behavior into two broad categories (for a review of those theoretical models which have been proposed see Ford and Hansen, 1991; Jones, 1991; Randall and Gibson, 1990). The first category includes variables associated with the individual decision maker. The second category consists of variables which form and define the situation in which the individual makes decisions.
This paper uses these two broad categories as an organizational scheme to review empirical studies that have been published on the ethical decision process. While it could be argued...