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Journal of Business Ethics (2009) 84:151165 Springer 2008 DOI 10.1007/s10551-008-9690-7
Effects of the Use of the Availability Heuristic on Ethical Decision-Making in Organizations
Sefa Hayibor David M. Wasieleski
ABSTRACT. Recent corporate scandals across various industries have led to an increased focus on research in business ethics, particularly on understanding ethical decision-making. This increased interest is due largely to managers desire to reduce the incidence of unwanted behaviors in the workplace. This article examines one major moderator of the ethical decision-making process moral intensity. In particular, we explore the potential influence of a particular cognitive heuristic the availability heuristic on perceptions of moral intensity. It is our contention that moral intensity is a perceptual construct, and that individuals use of the availability heuristic will influence perceptions of moral intensity which, in turn, will affect how moral issues are viewed and ultimately resolved. In this article, we present propositions concerning possible relationships between the availabilities of various phenomena and the components that moral intensity comprises, and report on two studies examining the effects of availabilities on two of these components: magnitude of consequences and social consensus. Our findings indicated that the availability of consequences associated with an act was positively related to perceptions of the magnitude of consequences of that act. We also found that the availability of others who believe that a particular act is morally acceptable is positively related to perceptions of social consensus that that act is morally acceptable. We posit that our results suggest the possibility that perceptions of moral intensity can be actively influenced to reduce unethical behavior in organizations.
KEY WORDS: moral intensity, ethical decision-making, issue recognition, availability heuristic, cognitive bias
Introduction
Given the recent spate of highly publicized unethical activity in organizations, much attention has been
given to discovering ways to reduce the incidence of such undesirable behaviors. Public demands for increased attention to ethics in corporations has led to a diverse set of research centering on decision-making within organizations (see Low et al., 2000). Various business disciplines have reacted to the ethics scandals by examining aspects of Rests (1986) ethical decision-making model (Douglas et al., 2001; Leitsche, 2004; Paolillo and Vitell, 2002). The goal of these efforts is to discover what causes ethical decision-making in business (McMahon and...
