Abstract

This study deals with the topic of business ethics and more specifically focuses on how Chief Executive Officers in corporate America identify business situations that pose ethical dilemmas. This research identifies the business situations that pose ethical issues for CEOS and analyzes how the issue identification varies by individual and organizational attributes by exploring two research questions and seven hypotheses. ;A survey was sent to 417 CEOs, of which 91 usable responses were used. Several analysis techniques were used to analyze the resultant data, descriptive data techniques such as frequency distributions and means, factor and cluster analysis, and cross-tabulation to validate the hypotheses. ;A number of conclusions can be drawn from this study. First, business issues still do cause ethical proportions for CEOs. The identification of these issues is based on a multitude of demographic factors, from both individual and organizational perspectives. Secondly, CEOs have a greater amount of concern for more recent business issues than those that have been around for decades: As technology has advanced, it has introduced a new set of business situations with ethical proportions that CEOs must now deal with. And finally, the most heavily supported hypotheses was that male and female CEOs similarly encounter and identify ethical situations. This issue continues to become more relevant as more women climb the corporate ladder into key decision making positions. ;The results of this study are discussed in further detail and limitations and implications for further research are provided