Ethical Decision Making, Interactionist Model of

In the 1980s, a number of ethics-related scandals in business and other organizations were garnering media attention, suggesting that management theorists might wish to attend to the arena of ethical decision-making behavior in a way that they had not previously done. Organizational behavior researchers, borrowing from work by psychologists, were moving beyond debates about person or situation effects toward recognizing the importance of both individual and situational influences and their interactions on behavior. But there were no explicit models guiding research on ethical decision making and behavior. In 1986, Linda Treviño adopted an interactionist view on ethical decision making in organizations which posited that ethical decision making in organizations results largely not only from the individual’s cognitive moral development but also from the interaction of cognitive moral development with other individual differences and contextual features. She offered the model in an attempt to move [Page 260]beyond normative approaches that provide guidance about what people “should” do in ethically challenging situations and beyond less theoretically grounded survey research that had previously identified problems with ethical pressures in organizations but did not offer much in the way of theory that could guide future empirical research. However, other research that had been conducted in the 1970s pointed in the direction of taking into account both individual differences and organizational factors. For example, two laboratory studies by W. Harvey Hegarty and Henry P. Sims found support for the influence of Machiavellianism, rewards for unethical behavior (both increased unethical behavior), and organizational ethics policies (reduced unethical behavior). As noted above, the movement toward an interactionist view also fit with broader trends in organizational behavior. This entry outlines the person-situation interactionist model, describing its essential features. It begins with an overview of cognitive moral development theory, followed by an explanation of how contextual influences and other individual differences are posited to interact with cognitive moral development to influence ethical decisions and behavior.