Religious Intensity, Evangelical Christianity, and Business Ethics: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Research on the relationship between religious commitment and business ethics has produced widely varying results and made the impact of such commitment unclear. This study presents an empirical investigation based on a questionnaire survey of business managers and professionals in the United States yielding a database of 1234 respondents. Respondents evaluated the ethical acceptability of 16 business decisions. Findings varied with the way in which the religion variable was measured. Little relationship between religious commitment and ethical judgment was found when responses were compared on the basis of broad faith categories -Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, other religions, and no religion. However, respondents who indicated that religious interests were of high or moderate importance to them demonstrated a higher level of ethical judgment (less accepting of unethical decisions) than others in their evaluations. Evangelical Christians also showed a higher level of ethical judgment.

Which Ethics Will Make us Individually and Socially Happier? A Cross-Culture and Cross-Development Analytical Model

“…Moreover, it could be linked to Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist beliefs: the suggested rules of behaviours come from God through the voice of prophets or from the Truth achieved by individual reasoning, and freedom consists of following them, i.e. the goals are fixed by something external to the individual will or they are the same for each individual or they are not chosen differently by individuals (for recent examples, Romar, 2002;Martin Calkins, 2000;Bloodgood et al, 2008;Conroy and Emerson, 2004;Angelidis and Ibrahim, 2004;Wong, 2008;Longenecker, et al, 2004). Finally, this case could depict Nietzsche's fidelity to earth, with individuals being perceived within nature.…”

Christian Ethics and Spirituality in Leading Business Organizations: Editorial Introduction

“…Among these works, there are some related to the economic system and marketplace (Hill and Downers 1997;Jones 1997;Bayer 1999;Longenecker et al 2004;McDaniel 2011;Gustafson 2013) and business (Magill 1992;Child 1995;Elegido 2003;Kim et al 2009;Bay et al 2010;Abela 2014). Others, more specifically, refer to the theory of the firm and the purpose of business (Naughton et al 1995;Abela 2001;Cortright and Naughton 2002;Lower 2008), to the nature of the firm (Naughton 2006;Melé 2012b), virtues in business (Naughton and Cornwall 2006), and how to manage business from the Christian faith from a theoretical perspective (Naughton 1992;Alford and Naughton 2001), or through case studies (Ibrahim et al 1991;Lee et al 2003;Demuijnck 2009;Naughton and Specht 2011).…”

The Impact of Business Ethics Course on Ethical Perceptions and Intentions of University Students

“…Using short scenarios (vignettes) has the benefit of allowing the researcher to introduce a greater amount of background information and detail into an ethically questionable issue (Fritzsche and Becker, 1982). Hence, vignettes are thought to elicit, "a higher quality of data in this type of research than is possible from simple questions" (Cavanaugh and Fritzsche, 1985;Tsalikis & Ortiz-Buonafina, 1990;Longenecker et al, 2004). In the current study, four vignettes are used (See Appendix).…”