Abstract
Accountants and auditors are often faced with ethical dilemmas, which they have to process using resources available to them. Although they may be sensitive to the ethicality of the issues and have the cognitive ability to work through a judgment process, the final action they take may be dependent on a number of motivational factors, endogenous to the issue. Agency issues are a continuing area of concern providing accountants with an ability to shirk their responsibilities and hide confidential information, which may affect their career prospects if disclosed. This ongoing study explores these notions within a stakeholder context and uses a post test only field experiment to gain evidence to support the existence of an agency problem and that membership to one of a number of motivational typologies directly affects the way accountants respond to ethical issues. This association causes them to adopt informational heuristics that may result in less than optimal decisions. This study identified two specific endogenous constructs, namely social consensus and venal intent that discriminate between motivational types and which possibly provide psychological underpinnings explaining membership orientation.
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Gordon Woodbine PhD, FCPA, is a senior lecturer with the School of Accounting, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Western Australia involved primarily with research and supervision activities. He has taught in universities in the People’s Republic of China and Papua New Guinea and has been published in a number of local and overseas refereed journals. He is interested in behavioural ethics, auditing, governance issues and ethics in education.
Appendix 1
Appendix 1
Problems in Internal Audit – Should management be informed?
You are required to place yourself in the position of the principal character, namely Graham Perrin (having regard to his given circumstances) and indicate the likelihood of your advising management about your work mates’ questionable activities.
(Select one of the numbers on the scale below)
Before proceeding to the next page, write down on a piece of paper what you believe are the issues that would affect your decision if you were in Graham’s position.
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Woodbine, G.F. Moral Choice and the Concept of Motivational Typologies: An Extended Stakeholder Perspective in a Western Context. J Bus Ethics 79, 29–42 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-007-9390-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-007-9390-8