Shaping Ethical Perceptions: An Empirical Assessment of the Influence of Business Education, Culture, and Demographic Factors

ABSTRACT. Recent events at Enron, K-Mart, Adelphia, and Tyson would seem to suggest that nianagers are still experiencing ethical lapses. These lapses are somewhat surprising and disappointing given the height-ened focus on ethical considerations within business contexts during the past decade. This study is designed, therefore, to increase our understanding ofthe forces that shape ethical perceptions by considering the effects of business school education as well as a number of other individual-level factors (such as intra-national culture, area of specialization within business, and gender) that may exert an influence on ethical perceptions. We found sig-nificant effects for business education, self-reported intra-national culture, area of specialization within business, and gender for some and/or all areas of ethics examined (i.e., deceit, fi'aud, self-interest, influence dealing, and coer-cion). One of our most encouraging findings is that tol-erance for unethical behavior appears to decrease with formal business education. Despite the prevalent stereo-type that business students are only interested in the bot-tom line or that business schools transform idealistic fireshman into self-serving business graduates, our results suggest otherwise. Given the heightened criticism of the ethicality of contemporary managerial behavior, it is heartening to note that, even as adults, individuals can be positively affected by integration of ethics training. KEY WORDS: culture, ethics education, ethical perceptions Previous ethics research suggested that many man-agers fail to recognize the ethical issues inherent in their workplace situations (Carroll, 1993). Recent events at Enron, K-Mart, World Com and Tyso