How relevant is the moral intensity concept for ethics education and training? Some evidence from practicing accounting consultants.

• Author: Svanberg, Jan

1. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND OF THE ARGUMENT

   The reasons for teaching ethics to students and practitioners are apparent after the many cases of fraudulent financial reporting. But accounting ethics is regarded as a difficult topic to teach and some even believe that ethical competence cannot be taught after the age of five. Despite that, most are optimistic and several themes for ethics education have been pointed out. One idea is to incorporate into ethics teaching what is known about how people process different types of ethical issues when they resolve ethical issues. Previous research has demonstrated that people react differently to ethical issues depending on how severe the ethical problems are perceived to be. A situation that is perceived as high on moral intensity is more easily detected as a moral dilemma and is resolved at a higher level of moral reasoning than are less intense situations. Motivation for the chosen course of action is also higher when the perceived moral intensity is higher. Therefore, one way to improve ethical decision-making would be to teach students and about moral intensity perceptions.

   The possibility to implement knowledge about moral intensity judgment to accounting education has been discussed by Sweeney and Costello (2009). They claimed a relevance of this knowledge not only for higher education but also for third level educators and employers such as accounting firms which recruit directly from college. Of particular interest to their study was to investigate the relationship between perceived moral intensity and the ethical decision-making process, with the purpose to "extend Jones's (1991) theoretical model to the ethical decision-making process of accounting and other business students using business scenarios" (Sweeney and Costello, 2009: 3). How this knowledge could be subject matter of teaching accounting ethics is not reported in their study, and a previous study, also conducted on accounting students by Leitsch (2006) is similarly unclear about this matter. Both studies were built on the general point of view that knowledge about factors that impact on how accountants and students make ethical decisions would improve accounting education. Relevance and value of their studies and the current study lies in the fact that we need to know how good moral decisions are made before we can teach students how to make them. Although debated, it is a more and more frequently held view that a better education in accounting ethics would contribute a positive value and that accounting education is not delivering this service today (c.f. Pierce and O'Gorman, 2004).

   Previous studies have addressed the ethical decision-making process of accountants faced with moral conflicts (Shaub, 1994; Armstrong, 1987; Wright et al., 1997; Douglas et al., 2001). A common division is between individual, situational and organizational factors that impact on moral decision-making. The most frequent way to test the impact of moral intensity perception on morality is to verify relationships between perceived moral intensity and the three first factors of Rest's (1979) four factors model of moral decision-making. Such studies have been conducted in several professional areas, both on students and practicing professionals (c.f. Singhapakdi et al., 1996; Singer and Singer, 1997; May and Pauli, 2002; Kelley and Elm, 2003). Most previous research has demonstrated relationships between moral intensity perceptions and how persons make moral decisions. In the accounting context this theme has received comparably little attention. The few previous studies in the accounting context that has examined such relationships have measured how students respond to moral dilemmas, but there is no evidence of how practicing auditors or accountants respond to moral intensity as they make moral decisions using their professional expertise. In particular, bearing in mind that accountants are not a quite homogenous group of professionals, there is the possibility that different groups react differently depending on their education background, job tasks, organization size etc., and these issues have not been previously investigated. Knowledge about how such factors relate to the quality of moral decision-making would be useful to incorporate in various forms of accounting education. Recognizing the importance of moral issues to the accounting profession it is obvious that.

   The present study researches the relationship between perceived moral intensity and moral decision-making of a type of accountants that has not previously been studied. Accounting consultants in Sweden typically are organized in a professional organization, have no university education, and their job task is to perform accounting as external consultants for small or medium sized clients. Considering that this group is quite different in education background it is possible that this group reacts in a different way to moral intensity than college students or practicing auditors. The purpose of this study is to extend Jones's (1991) theoretical model to the ethical decision-making process of practicing accounting consultants. Insights into the ethical decision-making process of practicing accountants is expected to have implications for educators and employers such as accounting firms which recruit this category of employee. Knowledge about how moral intensity perceptions relate to the quality of decision-making enables improvement of education and training in moral decision-making. Specifically, the study will explore the relationship between the perceived moral intensity and the ethical decision-making process of practicing accounting consultants. The study will also examine the factor structure of the original six factor moral intensity construct.

2. PREVIOUS RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF RESEARCH PROPOSITIONS

   Context sensitive moral reasoning and action has accumulated a significant amount of interest during the last decades. The most noticed study, though not empirical, is Jones (1991) who introduced the concept moral intensity which denotes the dependence of moral judgment and behaviour on the moral issue itself. Jones suggested that a person's perception of a moral issue varies with situations and that the perception of a moral dilemma is an important determinant of the person's moral reasoning and behaviour. According to Jones' argumentation dilemmas of high intensity catch the person's intention better than low intensity dilemmas, moral judgment and motivation to act morally in the situation is influenced by moral intensity as well.

   1. Dimensionality of moral intensity

      From an educator's or professional trainer's perspective a tendency to reduce the six moral intensity factors, as originally suggested by Jones (1991), would be a sign of a potential weakness the professional group's thinking regarding moral situations. The six factors can be understood as the moral resolution power of professionals when they perceive the moral aspect of a situation. A professional accountant who is able to distinguish the impact of six different intensity factors would have a more fine grained moral perception than an accountant who can only distinguish the impact of two dimensions of moral intensity. The fewer the dimensions of the perceptive machinery, the less sensitive for intricate differences between situations would an accountant be. Therefore, the educational and training relevance of the moral intensity construct regarding the possibility to empirically reduce the six dimension construct to fewer dimensions would be a concern for the negative effects of a too much simplified perceptive structure in the minds of accountants. According to Jones original article the idea is that each dimension represents important information derived from commonly accepted moral principles adopted from moral philosophies. A reduction of sensitivity for some of these dimensions would therefore be a lack of moral ability of the subject. What does previous research have to say about accountants' tendency to reduce the six dimensions perception of moral intensity? So far, little research has addressed the factor structure of moral intensity as it appears in the minds of professional accountants. The results of previous studies have used students as subjects for quasi-experiments, but from other professional areas there are some measurements of how subjects perceive moral intensity in terms of more or less dimensions.

      According to the Jones model, moral intensity is multidimensional consisting of six components, comprising (1) the magnitude of consequences, (2) the level of social consensus about the moral law, (3) the probability of effect, (4) temporal immediacy, (5) proximity, and (6) concentration of effect. A situation with high values on several dimensions is regarded as morally intense. The value on one dimension can be low and another can be high independently of each other. The resulting moral intensity is the compound of six dimensions, which are supposed by Jones to be relatively independent of each other. However, as will be discussed below previous studies demonstrate mixed support for relationships between the six components and the three first factors of Rest's four factors model. Furthermore, some studies have demonstrated that the six components can be reduced to a one, two, or three dimensional construct.

      The six dimension structure has been criticised, and several empirical studies have drawn the conclusion that fewer factors can be adopted instead of the original six. Most recently, in a study by Sweeney and Costello (2009) conducted on accounting and other business students, factor analysis revealed that the six factors could be reduced to two factors in three out of four scenarios. The factors were the same as found by Singhapakdi et al. (1996), 'perceived potential harm' and 'perceived social pressure'. Perceived potential harm consisted of...