Conceptualizing strategic ethical decision making: Cultural traits as moderator

Abstract

It has turned out that business organizations are forced to deal with a complex business environment. In such cases, recognizing and dealing with ethics, especially in the strategic decision-making process has become an unavoidable circumstance to the organizations. Well documented ethical scandals displaying unethical behaviours in the strategic decision making within the organization can be traced to several decades. From this evaluative viewpoint, plainly the ethical misconducts are basically not tolerable. While there are continuing debates in enlisting factors driving unethical behavior in the organization,strategic decision-making attributes and cultural traits within the organization flagged as a few prominent factors in understanding this phenomenon. Therefore, this study is an attempt to suggest a conceptual framework connecting strategic decision-making attributes and unethical behaviour. In order to improve the predictive validity of the framework, cultural traits are proposed as a moderator in understanding the relationship between strategic decision-making attributes and ethical behaviour. This framework is suggested based on the synthesis of relevant supporting literature underpinned by Deontology Theory. Although this study suffers empirical investigation, it still shed some theoretical direction in understanding unethical behavior among organizations.