An Important Antecedent of Ethical / Unethical Behavior: Religiosity

Abstract

In This study, we aimed to explore the relationship between religiosity and business ethics. Two dimensions of religiosity – intrinsic and extrinsic- were studied. We have tested two hypotheses related to the relationship between religiosity and ethical attitudes. In our study, we surveyed 510 managers from 6 different organizations in Turkey. Our survey instruments have three parts. First part included 24-vignette ethics scale of Barnett and Brown (1994). Second part included 11-item religiosity scale of Allport and Ross (1967). Third part contained various demographic measures. Findings of the study show that intrinsic religiosity is partly and positively related with ethical attitudes and extrinsic religiosity is partly and negatively related to the ethical attitudes. In other words, intrinsically motivated people are more prone to behave ethically than extrinsically motivated people are.

Keywords

• Religiosity
• ethical attitudes
• business ethics