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

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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.

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Notes

  1. For the reasons outlined above, we decided to focus solely on examining the effect of IMF on moral judgment in this study. As can be seen in Table 1, moral judgment is measured by participants’ responses to a set of hypothetical scenarios involving questionable behaviors in business settings. They are moral issues concerning the rights and duties of individuals in impersonal societal exchanges. Because the emphasis of binding moral foundations (BMF) is on groups and social institutions, and these foundations are less relevant to the moral violation of rights and duties in a business setting (i.e., not closely related to the operational definition of moral judgment of this study), we chose not to examine the effect of BMF in the present research. However, we must point out that this choice was primarily based on a practical consideration rather than a theoretical one. Hence, the important role of BMF in moral judgment should not be discounted.

  2. The dollar amount was calculated based on the exchange rate at the time of data collection.

  3. To assess the robustness of the results, we further estimated the two models using hierarchical regression analysis. The coefficient estimates turned out to be highly similar to those resulting from the parsimonious latent-variable interaction analysis: β 1 = .145 (p < .01) and β 2 = .169 (p < .01). For the full model, both interaction terms of IMF•REL (β 6 = −.095, p < .05) and IMF•MD (β 7 = .157, p < .01) showed a significant impact on moral judgment. The change in variance explained by the full model versus the base model was significant (`F(3, 443) = 4.07, p < .01). These coefficients mirror what we found in the parsimonious latent-variable interaction analysis, indicating that the results were unaffected by the method used.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Faculty Research Grants (Business) of Lingnan University to the third author (Grant Number: DB14A2).

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  1. Department of Marketing and Management Sciences, William Paterson University of New Jersey, 1600 Valley Road, Wayne, NJ, USA

    Fuan Li & Mike Chen-ho Chao

  2. Management Department, Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong

    Nancy Yi-feng Chen

  3. Business School, University of International Business and Economics, 10 Huixindong Street, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100029, People’s Republic of China

    Sixue Zhang

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Li, F., Chao, M.Ch., Chen, N.Yf. et al. Moral judgment in a business setting: The role of managers’ moral foundation, ideology, and level of moral development. Asia Pac J Manag 35, 121–143 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-017-9529-9

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