The Influence Of Moral Development And Culture Value Orientation On Ethical Decision-making

Integrating ethics in management and implementing ethical management is the frontier research subject among the current management area and scholars. Ethical decision-making is one of the important aspects. When the business ethics movement wave agitates in the West and comes the business ethics era, some enterprises in our country, however, have made some moral disengagement in the China’s twenty years transformation. We are looking forward to business ethics more than ever. However, the cultural differences between West and East countries make a lot of research on ethical decision-making lack applicability in our country. For example, we are a country putting emphasis on human relations and the ethical behavior of managers are influenced by the Confucian tradition of relationship ethics, who define and evaluate ethical issues according to the relationship behavior and the pattern of behavior, which is always different to the Western societies who acting totally according to the legal norms. So, what factors are affecting corporate managers’decision-making behavior in the context of Chinese culture, how to improve our business ethics management, have become important research subjects.Based on this background, this paper studied the relative research of domestic and foreign scholars on ethical decision-making and aims to study the impact of cognitive moral development and personal cultural value orientation of managers on ethical decision-making process. Specifically, cognitive moral development was mainly used for the study of ethics or psychology in the past, but some scholars believe that it is also a very important factor affecting the ethical decision-making process; the empirical research is relatively small at present. One of the purposes of this study is to explore the relationship between them. In addition, at this stage, the ethical decision-making research rooted in Chinese local culture is also relatively small, lacking systematic study of how credit, people-orientation, collectivism, relationship-orientation and other cultural factors affecting the ethical decision-making process. Therefore, this study explores the relationship between cultural value orientation and ethical decision-making process, and also takes cultural value orientation as a regulator.In the empirical research, this study used a scenario questionnaire survey and120valid questionnaire samples were collected, using factor analysis, correlation analysis, regression analysis in the empirical analysis and the conclusions are as follows:(1) The level of individual cognitive moral development has significant predictive effect on ethical decision-making process of managers.(2) Cultural value orientation of managers will impact ethical decision-making process. Among them, the credit, people-oriented and collectivism have a positive impact on ethical decision-making process; the relationship between favor-seeking relationship and ethical decision-making process was not significant; rent-seeking relationship has a negative impact on ethical decision-making process.(3) Cultural value orientation regulates the relationship between the level of individual cognitive moral development and ethical decision-making process. The significance and limitations of this study were also discussed at last.