The relationship of business tenure and management tenure with moral reasoning in business managers.

摘要

The complexity of making ethical decisions in a globalized business environment and ongoing ethical failures in business organizations yield severe consequences at the individual, organizational, and even global economic level. These consequences continue to renew interest in understanding the ethical decision-making of managers. More specifically, researchers have studied numerous factors that can influence a manager's moral reasoning (MR), including personal factors (such as age and education), contextual factors (such as business, healthcare, or legal professional contexts), and situational factors (such as codes of ethics, pressure from superiors or stakeholders, or organizational norms). Researchers have been investigating whether the practice of business itself may be detrimental to MR, but studies thus far have yielded ambiguous or conflicting results. This study utilized a well-known instrument, the Defining Issues Test 2 (DIT2) to measure the MR of a group of randomly selected managers in the United States over the age of 25 to see if two predictor variables, business tenure and managerial tenure, had any relationship to MR, controlling for age, gender, and education level. No relationship was found, although other trends related to MR in previous studies were supported in this study and recommendations for further studies are discussed.