Ethical Decision-Making, Religious Beliefs and Software Piracy

Abstract

Software piracy has become one of the major social and business problems in our society as the information technology era came to the fore. IT companies and software developers lost huge sums of money due to software piracy. Most people would not link software piracy, commercial morality and religious beliefs together. However, management researchers propose that the moral tendency of an individual may affect the respective person's ethical decision-making towards copyright infringements, specifically software piracy. Thus, this paper attempts to identify the cause and effect relationship between morality and ethical decision-making. This research examines the relationship between an individual's religious beliefs and ethical decision-making with regard to software piracy in a scenario-based vignette. The structural equation model (SEM) is used to identify this cause and effect relationship. The research findings suggest that an individual's religious beliefs are pertinent to the ethical decision-making process with specific reference to software piracy.