Is Ethicality Good for Business: The Effects of Various Subconscious Contextual Cues/Priming of politeness, rudeness, and Moral Identity, on Business Ethical Perceptions and Subsequent Effect in Improving the Moral Concern for Stakeholders

Abstract

This study aims to determine that if an individual’s perceptions and actions could be altered when exposed to subtle contextual cues and does that affect their ethicality and concern for stakeholders. In business, the role of morality and intuitions have been increasingly inferred in decision making and operations, but this process is done without conscious awareness of individuals, as it is considered being a part of their personality and ideology about things. To achieve the desired type of ethical thinking and behavior from individuals, we performed this study in three parts; the First stage was priming under four conditions (politeness, moral identity, rudeness, and neutral) then examining their ethical perceptions over different scenarios, secondly, we access the presence of effects of priming on the stakeholders that people account responsible for the ethical or unethical decisions in business. And Thirdly, we aim to assess if the ethicality of individuals has a significant impact on the span of stakeholders’ concerns in a (un)ethical business scenario. For the collection of data, we divided our respondents into four groups (politeness, moral identity, rudeness, and neutral, four types of questionnaires were being filled, 50 from each of the sample groups making it a total of 200 samples. Data were analyzed using One-way ANOVA, confirmatory factor analysis, and structured equation modeling. Results suggested that positive priming makes individuals more ethical than neutral as well as negative priming groups, also they will consider a larger span of stakeholders while decision making. Confirmatory factor analysis shows that most of our indicators are good predictors of the target variable. In SEM we used Multi-Group Analysis to determine group-specific effects on the span of stakeholders and concluded that group “neutral” and the group “politeness” shows a significant difference from other groups while considering the span of stakeholders' concerns, given ethical scenarios and unethical scenarios respectively. The findings imply that we can use priming as a tool for self-education and training to enhance our ethicality, as considering a larger span of stakeholders while taking business decisions will always prove profitable for the organizations.