Responsible Leadership in Projects

CHAPTER

5

Ethical Decision Making

Introduction

There has been considerable focus on unethical behavior and decision making in recent years, as concerns regarding their impact and consequences have been laid bare through successive corporate scandals and questionable business practices (Muolo & Padilla, 2010). Within the academic community, this has spurned interest in how individuals arrive at ethical decisions. An ethical decision is a decision “that is both legally and morally acceptable to the larger community” (Jones, 1991, p. 367). The first review of studies in the area of ethical decision making was published just over two decades ago when Ford and Richardson (1994) summarized much of what was known to that point about factors ...