Abstract
Recent corporate scandals across various industries have led to an increased focus on research in business ethics, particularly on understanding ethical decision-making. This increased interest is due largely to managers’ desire to reduce the incidence of unwanted behaviors in the workplace. This article examines one major moderator of the ethical decision-making process – moral intensity. In particular, we explore the potential influence of a particular cognitive heuristic – the availability heuristic – on perceptions of moral intensity. It is our contention that moral intensity is a perceptual construct, and that individuals’ use of the availability heuristic will influence perceptions of moral intensity which, in turn, will affect how moral issues are viewed and ultimately resolved. In this article, we present propositions concerning possible relationships between the availabilities of various phenomena and the components that moral intensity comprises, and report on two studies examining the effects of availabilities on two␣of these components: magnitude of consequences and social consensus. Our findings indicated that the availability of consequences associated with an act was positively related to perceptions of the magnitude of consequences of that act. We also found that the availability of others who believe that a particular act is morally acceptable is positively related to perceptions of social consensus that that act is morally acceptable. We posit that our results suggest the possibility that perceptions of moral intensity can be actively influenced to reduce unethical behavior in organizations.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bandura A.: 1986, Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
Bird F., J. Gandz: 1991, Good Management: Business Ethics in Action. Prentice-Hall Canada, Scarborough, Ontario
Boyatzis R. E.: 1998, Transforming Qualitative Information. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA
Carlson D. S., K. M. Kacmar, L. L. Wadsworth: 2002, The Impact of Moral Intensity Dimensions on Ethical Decision Making: Assessing the Relevance of Orientation. Journal of Managerial Issues 14(1), 15–31
Carroll J. S.: 1978, The Effect of Imagining an Event on Expectations for the Event: An Interpretation in Terms of the Availability Heuristic’. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 14, 88–96
Chia A., L. M. Mee: 2000, The Effects of Issue Characteristics on the Recognition of Moral Issues. Journal of Business Ethics 27, 255–269
Douglas P. C., R. A. Davidson, B. N. Schwartz: 2001, The Effect of Organizational Culture and Ethical Orientation on Accountants’ Ethical Judgments. Journal of Business Ethics 34(2), 101–121
Folkes V. S.: 1988, The Availability Heuristic and Perceived Risk. Journal of Consumer Research 15(1), 13–23
Gardner D. G., L. L. Cummings, R. B. Dunham, J. L. Pierce: 1998, Single-Item Versus Multiple-Item Measurement Scales: An Empirical Comparison. Educational and Psychological Measurement 58(6), 898–915
Jones T. M.: 1991, Ethical Decision Making by Individuals in Organizations: An Issue-Contingent Model. Academy of Management Review 16(2), 366–395
Kabanoff B., J. Daly: 2002, Espoused Values in Organisations. Australian Journal of Management 27, 89–104
Kahneman D., P. Slovic, A. Tversky (eds.): 1982, Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, pp. 294–305
Kelly P. C., D. R. Elm: 2003, The Effect of Context on Moral Intensity of Ethical Issues: Revising Jones’s Issue-Contingent Model. Journal of Business Ethics 48, 139–154
Leitsche D. L.: 2004, Differences in the Perceptions of Moral Intensity in the Moral Decision Process: An Empirical Investigation of Accounting Students. Journal of Business Ethics 53(3), 313–323
Levi A. S., J. B. Pryor: 1987, Use of the Availability Heuristic in Probability Estimates of Future Events: The Effects of Imagining Outcomes Versus Imagining Reasons. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 40, 219–234
Lewandowsky S., P. W. Smith: 1983, The Effect of Increasing the Memorability of Category Instances on Estimates of Category Size. Memory and Cognition 11(4), 347–350
Loo R.: 2002, A Caveat on Using Single-Item Versus Multiple-Item Scales. Journal of Management Psychology 17(1), 68–74
Low T. W., L. Ferrell, P. Mansfield: 2000, A Review of Empirical Studies Assessing Ethical Decision Making Business. Journal of Business Ethics 25(3), 185–204
MacLeod C., L. Campbell: 1992, Memory Accessibility and Probability Judgments: An Experimental Evaluation of the Availability Heuristic. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 63, 890–902
Maley J. E., Hunt M., W. V. Parr: 2000, ‹Set-Size and Frequency-of-Occurrence Judgments in Young and Older Adults: The Role of the Availability Heuristic. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 53, 247–270
Manis M., J. Shedler, J. Jonides, T. Nelson: 1993, The Availability Heuristic in Judgments of Set-Size and Frequency of Occurrence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65, 448–457
Marshall B., P. Dewe: 1997, An Investigation of the Components of Moral Intensity. Journal of Business Ethics 16, 521–530
McKelvie S. J.: 1995, Bias in Estimated Frequency of Names. Perceptual and Motor Skills 81, 1331–1338
McKelvie S. J.: 1997, The Availability Heuristic: Effects of Fame and Gender on the Estimated Frequency of Male and Female Names. Journal of Social Psychology 137, 63–78
McKelvie S. J.: 2000, Quantifying the Availability Heuristic with Famous Names. North American Journal of Psychology 2(2), 347–356
McMahon J. M., R. J. Harvey: 2006, An Analysis of the Factor Structure of Jones’ Moral Intensity Construct. Journal of Business Ethics 64, 381–404
Morris S. A., R. A. McDonald: 1995, The Role of Moral Intensity in Moral Judgments: An Empirical Investigation. Journal of Business Ethics 14, 715–726
Nisbett R. E., Ross, L. D.: 1980, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, Prentice-Hall
Nunnaly J. C.: 1978, Psychometric Theory. McGraw-Hill, New York
Oppenheimer D. M.: 2004, Spontaneous Discounting of Availability in Frequency Judgment Tasks. Psychological Science 15(2), 100–105
Paolillo J. G. P., S. J. Vitell: 2002, An Empirical Investigation of the Influence of Selected Personal, Organizational and Moral Intensity Factors on Ethical Decision Making. Journal of Business Ethics 35, 65–74
Power S. J., L. L. Lundsten: 2005, Managerial and Other White-Collar Employees’ Perceptions of Ethical Issues in Their Workplaces. Journal of Business Ethics 60, 185–193
Rest J. R.: 1986, Moral Development: Advances in Research and Theory. Praeger, New York
Schwarz N., H. Bless, F. Strack, G. Klumpp, H. Rittenauer-Schatka, A. Simons: 1991, Ease of Retrieval as Information: Another Look at the Availability Heuristic. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 61(2), 195–202
Shadish W. R., T. D. Cook, D. T. Campbell D. T.: 2002, Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Generalized Causal Inference. Houghton-Mifflin Company, Boston
Shedler, J. K., J. Jonides and M. Manis: 1985, ‹Availability: Plausible but Questionable’, Paper Presented at the 26th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston
Singer M. S., A. E. Singer: 1997, Observer Judgements About Moral Agents’ Ethical Decisions: The Role of Scope of Justice and Moral Intensity. Journal of Business Ethics 16, 473–484
Singer M., S. Mitchell, J. Turner: 1998, Consideration of Moral Intensity in Ethicality Judgments: Its Relationship with Whistle Blowing and Need-for-Cognition. Journal of Business Ethics 17, 527–541
Singhapakdi A., S. J. Vitell, K. L. Kraft: 1996, Moral Intensity and Ethical Decision-Making of Marketing Professionals. Journal of Business Research 36, 245–255
Stapel D. A., S. D. Reicher, R. Spears: 1995, Contextual Determinants of Strategic Choice: Some Moderators of the Availability Bias. European Journal of Social Psychology 25, 141–158
Sunstein C. R.: 2003, What’s Available? Social Influence and Behavioral Economics. Northwestern University Law Review 97(3), 1295–1314
Trevino L. K.: 1986, Ethical Decision Making in Organizations: A Person-Situation Interactionist Model. Academy of Management Review 11(3), 601–617
Triplet R. G.: 1992, Discriminatory Biases in the Perception of Illness: The Application of Availability and Representativeness Heuristics to the AIDS Crisis. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 13(3), 303–322
Tversky A., D. Kahneman: 1973, Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability. Cognitive Psychology 5, 207–232
Waenke M., N. Scwarz, H. Bless: 1995, The Availability Heuristic Revisited: Experienced Ease of Retrieval in Mundane Frequency Estimates. Acta Psychologica. 89(1), 83–90
Wanous J. P., A. E. Reichers, M. J. Hudy: 1997, Overall Job Satisfaction: How Good Are Single-Item Measures?. Journal of Applied Psychology, 82(2), 247–252
Waters J. A., F. Bird, P. D. Chant: 1986, Everyday Moral Issues Experienced by Managers. Journal of Business Ethics 5, 373–384
Watley L. D., D. R. May: 2004, Enhancing Moral Intensity: The Roles of Personal and Consequential Information in Ethical Decision-Making. Journal of Business Ethics 50, 105–126
Zacks R. T., L. Hasher, & H. Sanft: 1982, Automatic Encoding of Events Frequency: Further Findings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 8, 106–116
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Hayibor, S., Wasieleski, D.M. Effects of the Use of the Availability Heuristic on Ethical Decision-Making in Organizations. J Bus Ethics 84 (Suppl 1), 151–165 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-008-9690-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-008-9690-7