Moral Awareness in Business Organizations: Influences of Issue-Related and Social Context Factors

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Abstract
Individuals' awarenessof moral issues is an important first step in the ethicaldecision-making process. Relying on research in social cognition andbusiness ethics, we hypothesized that moral awareness is influenced byissue-related factors (magnitude of consequences of the moral issueand issue framing in moral terms) and social contextrelated factors(competitive context and perceived social consensus that the issue isethically problematic). The hypotheses were tested in a fieldexperiment involving 291competitive intelligence practitioners.Results generally supported the hypotheses. Qualitative analysisyielded additional insights into the content of respondents' moralawareness.