Ethical Decision-Making, Essay Example

Within this article, the same ethical issues surround the research problem, purpose and questions, data collection and analysis or interpretation of the final study results. Ultimately, the ethical issues surround determining the appropriate relationship that individual, social and cultural determinants have on ethical decision-making within a person and, furthermore, within an organizational environment structure. From an individual perspective, the authors attempted to use Machiavellianism, locus of control and codes of ethics to determine appropriate relationships in the individual decision-making. However, the authors also examine the social (peer) aspects that influence individual ethics as a bi-product of spending time with and sharing beliefs with other individuals. As opposed to examining these determinants individually, the main purpose of this study was to prove that the social determinants have greater force on manipulating individual behavior and ethical decision-making. The design of the study and the overall analysis swayed readers to believe that, when addressing this issue, the social determinants are highest manipulating factors. Overall application of this research in the real world would propose that managers and organizations seek to develop a social code of conduct in practice that would extend past management and perhaps be less formal in structure.

My own personal experience with scholarly writing and research is that many authors attempt to concentrate on specifically proving that a hypothesis is accurate as opposed to remaining unbiased and concentrate on the overall quality of the study. This is an easy flaw in the research design as the individual(s) conducting the study have spent hundreds of hours working on the design of the study, finding an appropriate sample size, conducting the study and then evaluating the results. Typically, a key flaw in most scholarly research involves the design of the study (Creswell, 2009). Most studies are geared towards delivering specific results as opposed to leaving the area of “unknown” available. The goal of any scholarly research study should not be to prove that the author’s hypothesis is accurate, but to examine how the results of the study directly and indirectly propose a conclusion to a problem – or propose more unanswered questions to the problem for future research. Remaining unbiased and professional during the process of scholarly writing and research is a key concept that has been insightful to me during this course.

Bibliography

Creswell, J. W. (2009). Research design, qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. New York, NY: Sage Publications, Inc.