ABO Dissertation Award
Winner
THE
INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL INTERACTION ON AUDITORS' MORAL REASONING
Linda Thorne
Schulich School of Business
York University
The purpose of this dissertation
is twofold. First, to develop two context-specific measures of
accountants' moral reasoning. Second, to explore the effect of
group discussion on auditors' moral reasoning. The rationale,
approach and results pertaining to each of the two objectives are
described in turn.
Past accounting ethics research
adopting a cognitive-developmental perspective has focused on
understanding the factors that promote accountants' development of
cognitive moral capacity. Cognitive moral capacity does
not necessarily correspond to the moral reasoning accountants
apply to the resolution of ethical dilemmas in the work place.
Cognitive moral capacity describes the most sophisticated moral
reasoning of which an individual is capable, whereas moral
reasoning describes the actual cognitive assessment an individual
applies to a particular ethical dilemma. There are two different
types of moral reasoning: prescriptive reasoning and deliberative
reasoning. As applied to the ethical decision process of
accountants, prescriptive reasoning is analogous to an
accountant's formulation of his or her professional judgment of
the ideal resolution to an ethical dilemma, and deliberative
reasoning is analogous to an accountant's intention to exercise
professional judgment to resolve an ethical dilemma. To develop
two accounting-specific measures of prescriptive and deliberative
moral reasoning, the Defining Issues Test (DIT) was selected as a
prototype. Professional accountants and experts were used to
ensure the cases and scoring of the measures elicited a
representative moral reasoning process of accountants, according
to a cognitive-developmental perspective. The validity and
reliability of the accounting-specific measures are comparable to
that found in the DIT. The results of comparisons of scores on the
accounting-specific measures to their DIT scores suggests that
accountants do not resolve ethical dilemmas at their cognitive
moral capacity. Thus, the accounting-specific measures of moral
reasoning may be useful in future research to investigate factors
and approaches that will encourage accountants to resolve ethical
dilemmas at their cognitive moral capacity.
These measures were used in an
experiment that explores the effect of group discussion on 286
auditors' resolution of ethical dilemmas. Auditors rarely make
professional judgments without consulting others. Instead,
auditors' professional judgments are typically made following a
discussion of the contentious issues with other auditors (Gibbins
and Mason 1988). Hypotheses were developed based upon an
integration of social-psychological explanations into a
cognitive-developmental framework. In one experiment, auditors
were asked to prescriptively discuss how an accountant ideally
should resolve an ethical dilemma, while in the other experiment,
subjects were asked to deliberatively discuss how an accountant
actually would resolve an ethical dilemma. The results showed that
subjects have higher moral reasoning scores after prescriptive
discussion, and lower moral reasoning scores after deliberative
discussion. Thus, the study findings point to the importance of
type of discussion for predicting and explaining accountants'
moral reasoning. These findings suggest that auditors should be
encouraged to prescriptively discuss ethical dilemmas as this is
likely to have beneficial effects on auditors' moral reasoning,
and deliberative discussion of ethical dilemmas should be avoided
as this tends to have adverse effects on the moral reasoning of
auditors. |