Auditor’s Ethical Judgments: The Influence of Moral Intensity, Ethical Orientation and Client Importance

Abstract

This study examined auditors’ ethical judgments using two theoretical perspectives; (1) Moral intensity constructs of Jones’ (1991) Model and (2) Forsyth’s (1980) framework of individual ethical orientation. The importance of the moral issues and how they affected the auditors’ ethical judgments together with the influence of individual’s ethical orientation and the client importance is discussed. A research instrument consisted of two scenarios with different level of moral intensity issues and utilized a 12-item of moral intensity measurement and a Forsyth’s (1980) scale to measure ethical orientation along two dimensions, idealism and relativism. The client importance is manipulated in this between-subjects study. The results of 152 auditors’ found that the effects of the moral intensity construct and the client importance on auditors’ ethical judgments is different based on the issues intensity level of the scenarios. Whereas, both dimensions of the individual ethical orientation (idealism and relativism) are found significant in both of the scenarios tested. The limitations of the study and recommendation for future studies are also discussed.