An Investigation of the Effect of Personal Values on the Students' Ethical Decision-Making Process

Abstract

Recently, a number of researchers have sought to determine variables that may affect the ethical decision-making process. One of these variables is personal values that are guidelines for doing the ethical behavior. Personal values play an important role in the ethical decision-making process. In this study, we examined the effects of business students' terminal and instrumental values on the ethical decision-making process. We considered ethical decision-making process as an ethical awareness, ethical orientation, and ethical intention. In order to measure ethical awareness, we tested whether a particular action was ethical/unethical based on ethical theories like justice, deontology, utilitarianism, relativism. Students' intentions to perform ethical behaviors were measured by the probability of doing questionable action. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate the effects of personal values on the students' ethical decision-making criteria and intention to perform the ethical behavior. For this purpose, we used a self-administrated questionnaire method in order to collect data from business department students in Turkey. The 406 usable questionnaires were received from the voluntarily participated students in this research. During the analysis process, Partial Least Squares Path Modeling (PLS-PM) analysis method was used. The analysis results reveal that an instrumental value positively affects the students' ethical decision-making criteria. Particularly, utilitarianism, justice, and relativism dimensions have the strongest effect on students' intention to perform ethical behaviors.