Examining moral judgment and ethical decision-making in information technology managers and their relationship

Growing incidences of corporate ethical misconducts have revived the debate over ethical reasoning and moral development of corporate managers. The role of information technology (IT) in the ethical dilemmas is becoming more evident as virtual environments become increasingly popular, organizations adopt digital form of record keeping, and the processing speed of computing technologies increase tremendously. This quantitative descriptive correlational study investigated the moral judgment of information technology managers as measured by the Defining Issue Test (DIT-2), ethical decision-making in terms of moral sensitivity measured by the IT Ethics Survey, and examined the relationship between moral judgment and ethical decision-making. The findings revealed that IT managers’ level of moral development matched that of Kohlberg’s Stage 4 or maintaining norms. IT managers’ overall moral sensitivity was encouraging, especially when it concerned general ethics and ethical use of workplace resources. However, moral sensitivity was low concerning protection of intellectual property and privacy. Sufficient evidence did not exist to support the presence of a significant correlation between moral judgment and overall moral sensitivity