پیش بینی ها، نتیجه، و اندازه گیری قضاوت اخلاقی : بررسی و فرا تحلیل

As a central construct in theories of ethical decision making, ethical judgments have been the subject of more than one hundred empirical studies. Despite its size, the ethical judgments literature seems to lack clarity in three areas. First, empirical results are sometimes inconsistent or contradictory across studies. Second, a broad array of diverse measures of ethical judgments raises concerns about research validity. Third, differences in sample composition may affect comparability of study results. To help resolve these issues, this study conducts a review and meta-analysis of the ethical judgments literature. The results offer insights in all three areas. They help resolve some of the inconsistencies in the relationships between ethical judgments and certain theoretical antecedents; they support the use of diverse measures of ethical judgments; and they offer caution in the use of student samples in ethical judgments research.

The ethical judgments construct occupies prominent theoretical and empirical roles in the business ethics literature. Ethical judgments is central to major theories of ethical decision making (i.e., Hunt and Vitell, 1986, Hunt and Vitell, 1992, Jones, 1991 and Rest, 1986) and appears in well over one hundred empirical studies. Despite its size and level of development, the ethical judgments literature seems to lack clarity in some important respects. First, empirical research on theoretically important correlates of ethical judgments frequently appears to be inconsistent with theory and occasionally contradictory of other empirical research. Second, great diversity exists in the measurement of ethical judgments. Studies of ethical judgments employ single- and multi-item measures with varied means of scaling responses. Yet these widely different measurement approaches purport to operationalize the same construct. Third, differences in sample composition across studies can attenuate effect sizes and inhibit the comparability of results. Collectively, these issues may limit research generalizability and hinder the testing of ethical decision making theories. In light of these conditions, the time seems opportune for a meta-analytic review of the ethical judgments literature. Unlike narrative literature reviews, meta-analyses permit researchers to quantitatively summarize findings across studies and establish the generalizability of reported relationships. Additionally, meta-analyses help resolve inconsistent findings by evaluating the effects of study characteristics on empirical results. Therefore, this study reports the results of a meta-analysis of the ethical judgments literature to address the areas of needed clarity described above. To help resolve inconsistent or conflicting results, this study reviews the literature to identify relevant antecedents and a consequence of ethical judgments, develops hypotheses about them, and then tests the hypotheses. To investigate how measurement affects the relationships between ethical judgments and its antecedents and consequence, the study tests for moderation of the relationships by various types of ethical judgments measures. Moderation effects by sample composition are tested by comparing student to nonstudent samples. The study concludes with a discussion of the results on future ethical judgments research.

The results of this analysis indicate some success towards meeting the three objectives set earlier for this research. Perhaps the most noteworthy result pertains to the issue of measurement. The great diversity that exists in approaches to measuring ethical judgments raises serious concerns of validity. While a single standardized measure of ethical judgments may not be necessary or even desirable, testing of ethical decision theories requires valid measures of major constructs. A wide array of study-specific measures could work against this requirement. Thus, the absence of moderation effects by measure type or judgment scale suggests that ethical judgments is conceptually amenable to varied operationalizations, a result that bodes well for the current state of the art in ethical judgments research. That said, the growing popularity of well-tested ethical judgments measures such as the MES and CES is a positive development. The results also shed light on some of the inconsistencies in ethical judgments research discussed earlier. While this study does not resolve all of the conflicting results, the analysis may offer insight into some, particularly how education and income affect ethical judgments. These results support the view that, rather than make judgments stricter, education may open minds and enhance reasoning such that ethical judgments become less stringent, a perspective that is consistent with Kohlberg's (1981). The negative relationship between ethical judgments and income may imply that the condition of being wealthy or poor influences ethical standards and the strictness with which they are applied. The inverse relationship found in this analysis may be better explained by income's well-established positive association with education. Finally, the qualified evidence that student samples systematically produce greater effect sizes than nonstudent samples raises cautions about sample composition. Clearly, student samples provide a sometimes indispensible means of theory testing. However, to the extent that student samples inflate effect sizes, researchers should utilize samples that more readily permit generalizability of results. While this cautionary note is certainly not new, the results of this meta-analysis provide grounds for repeating it. Beyond the results highlighted above, the meta-analysis helps quantitatively support the generally consistent relationships between ethical judgments and several other variables. These include gender, idealism, relativism, Machiavellianism, ethical awareness, deontological and teleological evaluations, moral intensity, and the outcome variable, behavioral intentions. Rather than continue to test these well-established relationships, future research may wish to focus on variables with theoretically sound relationships to ethical judgments but for which no empirical relationships have been established. Such variables may include age, work experience, locus of control, religiosity, and ethical environment. These variables do not seem to significantly impact ethical judgments. Future research may identify potential boundary conditions that circumscribe the effects of these variables. Along these lines, future research can also examine other potential explanatory factors for observed differences in individuals' ethical judgments and behavioral intentions. Because ethical judgments play such a central role in theories of ethical decision making, the construct will remain an important part of research on ethical decision making and unethical behavior.