Moral awareness in business organizations:: Influences of issue-related and social context factors

Individuals' awareness of moral issues is an important first step in the ethical decision-making process. Relying on research in social cognition and business ethics, we hypothesized that moral awareness is influenced by issue-related factors (magnitude of consequences of the moral issue and issue framing in moral terms) and social context-related factors (competitive context and perceived social consensus that the issue is ethically problematic). The hypotheses were tested in a field experiment involving 291 competitive intelligence practitioners. Results generally supported the hypotheses. Qualitative analysis yielded additional insights into the content of respondents' moral awareness.