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This research explores the factors which influence and enhance ethical decision-making. Themes of managerial education, a liberal arts training, religiosity, personal value-guided behavior, and mindfulness are explored. This integrative paper reports two mixed method studies following an exploratory sequential design. The first qualitative study consisted of 30 qualitative semi-structure interviews of executives both at the C-level as well as at the middle manager level about their experiences in the corporate setting of ethical dilemmas which they faced. The second quantitative study involved a survey of 316 respondents composing of college students, entrepreneurs, and executives. Both studies provided insights about ethical decision-making at the workplace specifically the positive effects of personal value-guided behavior and religiosity. The relationship between mindfulness and ethical decision-making could not be demonstrated. As business ethics involves its own set of morals and values (e.g., profit-maximization vs ethics-maximization) that are becoming central in a workplaces and corporations, ethical business leaders stand to benefit from exploring multiple ways of neutralizing ethical misconduct including relying on personal values and religiosity.

Two studies analyzed the factor structure of the 8-item Multidimensional Ethics Scale (MES) (Reidenbach and Robin, 1988, 1990), a 30-item MES (the 30 items used to develop the 8-item measure), and a Perceived Moral Intensity Scale. Factor analyses supported a 3-factor structure for the 8-item MES, marginally supported a 5-factor structure (but more strongly suggested a 1-factor structure) for the 30-item MES, and supported a 3-factor structure for the Perceived Moral Intensity Scale. These scales were then used in a third study that examined the effect of manipulated and perceived moral intensity (Jones, 1991) on participants' ethical judgment of actions taken in 18 scenarios of an arguably ethical nature. A within-subject design found that manipulated moral intensity had a significant effect on ethical judgment, but perceived moral intensity did not. When ethical judgment (as measured by the three factors of the 8-item MES) was regressed on age, gender, major, perceived moral intensity factors, and interactions between age, gender, major and perceived moral intensity factors, the variance accounted for (R2) was significant for each of the three ethical judgment factors in both high and low intensity conditions using a between-subjects design, but was only significant for one of the ethical judgment factors (Moral Equity), and this only for low intensity scenarios, using a within-subject design. One explanation for the difference in effect appears to be that the means for the three perceived moral intensity factors were significantly different for the low versus high intensity condition using the between-subjects design, but the means of two of the three factors were not significantly different using the within-subject design. Three explanations for this were suggested: perceived moral intensity may not have reached a necessary threshold due to explicit referents for comparison; cognitive demand may have been greater when two versions of a single scenario were being evaluated; and, the online administration of the study may have introduced greater error variance than the in-person paper-pencil administration. Ethical judgment was found to be a more robust predictor of intention than perceived moral intensity using a within-subject design. Suggestions were made for future research.