The Impact of Accountability on Ethical Decision Making: The Role of Context in Judgment Formation about Ethical Acceptability (original) (raw)

Using accountability to create a more ethical climate

Human Resource Management Review, 2004

According to Jones (1991) ethics influence judgments used to make decisions that are legal or morally acceptable to the larger community [Ethical decision-making by individuals in organizations: An issue-contingent model. Academy of Management Review, vol. 16(2) (pp. 366-395).]. Poor ethical decision-making costs industry billions of dollars a year and damages the images of corporations. Thus, ethics is an organizational and managerial issue. This paper describes how ethical decision-making is a multi-dimensional process; one that includes the individual, the ethical issues and the organizational context. It then shows how organizations can use accountability mechanisms to help control organizational misconduct, such as enforced codes of ethics and the creation of a values-based organization with top management support and strong ethical social consensus.

Moral Responsibility and Legal Liability, or, Ethics Drives the Law

2015

As William Shaw’s (2008) textbook states, by way of observation, “To a significant extent, law codifies a society’s customs, ideals, norms, and moral values” (pp. 10-11). Shaw adds that “changes in the law tend to reflect changes in what a society takes to be right and wrong...” (p. 11). We think Shaw is correct, and we work to have our students understand that ethics drives the law. Focusing on moral responsibility and legal liability, we offer a model that can help students see the relationship between law and ethics. First we highlight the broader concepts establishing moral responsibility and legal liability. Then we show that narrower, more specific principles in ethics have a parallel in law. For the former, we rely on long established considered judgments from ethics and established legal concepts. For the latter, we rely on the four specific elements associated with moral wrong-doing in organizational settings and on the famous 1983 Soldano v. O’Daniels case. Richard J. McGo...

Damage Control after Breaches of Ethical Conduct: An Attributional Approach to Accounting for Unethical Behavior

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss how personal accounts of breaches in ethical conduct can shape the impressions and behaviors of observers. We will argue that when actors use specific types of attributions as impression management techniques to account for their unethical behavior, observers tend to hold them less responsible than when these techniques are not used. We feel it necessary to state that our intention is not to provide advice to unethical individuals on how to avoid the consequences of their intentional unethical behavior. Rather, our aim is to provide sound advice and guidance to otherwise ethical individuals in how to minimize the damage created by rare breaches of ethical conduct. We focus on minimizing damage through damage control, which describes a set of organizational operating procedures and structure that are designed to minimize the distress associated with a specific hardship (Goldwasser, 1991).

Reflection and the Limits of Liability: Necessary Blindness in the Legal System

1993

The legal system needs to take a good hard look at the concept of responsibility. Whether it is crimnal guilt, products liability, or employment discrimination, the legal system is in the business of locating responsible actors and making them answerable for their behavior. Without a robust working understanding of responsibility, the legal system is nothing but an arbitrary exercise of power. Recent philosophical developments suggest a need to reexamine responsibility as it is currently understood m the legal system. Unfortunately, examining responsibility too closely is problematic because our current understanding, while robust and workable, is conceptually unable to withstand sustained scrutiny. In this essay, I investigate problems in our understanding of responsibility and show how the legal system tolerates those problems. The heart of my argument is that society's conception of responsibility rests on ideas of moral autonomy that insufficiently recognize the role of chan...

The Effect of Ethical Sensitivity and Accountability Pressures on the Ethical Decision-Making

Management accounting frontiers, 2023

This study investigates the effect of ethical sensitivity on Ethical Decision Making (EDM) in an accounting context, with a laboratory experiment using a 2x2 between subjects involving 61 postgraduate students. It considers the person-situation interaction approach with rationalistintuition as the basis of moral decisions. Our analysis reveals that ethical sensitivity affects EDM. Furthermore, accountability pressure interacts with ethical sensitivity to affect EDM. Our results are consistent with Rest (1986) model and Jones (1991) theory. EDM is affected by individual factors (ethical sensitivity) and organizational factors (anonymity and feedback accountability pressures). Our findings reveal that to improve EDM, organizations should increase the ethical sensitivity of their organizational members as well as set accountability pressures for them. Individu with high ethical sensitivity who are under the pressure of feedback accountability are more ethical in decision-making. This study employs students as subjects, the results should be interpreted cautiously. Future study should validate the findings using professional accountants as subjects or performing other research strategies, such as a qualitative approach, to answer why such phenomena exist.