Religiosity, spirituality and ethical decision-making: Perspectives from executives in Indian multinational enterprises

Abstract

Through a semi-structured interview with 40 senior executives from Indian multinational enterprises (MNEs), we use virtue ethics theory to examine the types of virtues that are promulgated by religiosity and spirituality in shaping ethical behavior. The responses were coded in NVivo and the themes and concepts were organized into four categories (e.g., environmental context, individual religious virtues, individual non-religious spiritual virtues, and organizational ethical virtues). These categories contributed to ethical decision-making. The findings suggest that it is critical to understand ethical decision-making by identifying virtues that are important in religious, spiritual, and humanistic contexts in countries such as India, which are religiously and spiritually diverse. The study findings assist in the development of a framework of ethical decision-making that can be used for further empirical testing across both non-Western and Western contexts in multi-faith populations. Several theoretical, practical, and methodological contributions are presented along with suggestions for future research.