What Factors Drive Ethical Decision-Making of Prospective Accountants?

The several reported unethical practices of accountants in recent times have heightened the call for attention on ethics and ethical decision-making of accountants. This chapter seeks to discuss the role of personal values (intellectualism, honesty, self-control, and religiousness) and the perceived importance of an ethical issue (PIE) in ethical decision-making. The chapter further develops an ethical decision-making model that builds upon a four-stage decision-making model by incorporating the relevance of an ethical issue and personal values into the model. We find that intellectualism, honesty, self-control, and religiousness are predictors of the ethical decision-making of prospective accountants. Similarly, we suggest that PIE is a key determinant of ethical decision-making. The study further provides some practical and policy directions to ensure the development and promotion of ethical judgment and behavior. Finally, the study ends by indicating some emerging areas in ethics that require more empirical discussions by future researchers. Target Audience This chapter is targeted at researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and students. To researchers, the study extends literature by introducing a new dimension to the discussions on ethical decision-making. The study incorporates the PIE and personal values into the four-stage ethical decision-making model. The study also draws attention to the key role that personal values play in the ethical decision-making process of an individual. Further, practitioners are well informed of the areas to pay attention to when making efforts to address unethical behaviors in their firms. To policymakers, this study provides direction on how to create an educational system that deliberately nurtures and creates ethical professionals. This study provides a synthesis of ethical decision-making to students, which will serve as background information based on which they can build new and relevant models in this area of research. It also provides suggestions for future research which may be relevant for further academic and empirical exploitation.