The Empirical Performance of Cognitive Moral Development in Predicting Behavioral Intent

The substantial work on cognitive moral development (CMD) by Lawrence Kohlberg and James Rest popularized the use of this construct in the literature on business ethics. This construct has been prominently used in models attempting to explain ethical/unethical behavior in management, marketing, and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Business ethics quarterly 1996-10, Vol.6 (4), p.493-515
Main Authors: Robin, Donald P., Gordon, Gus, Jordan, Charles, Reidenbach, R. Eric
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavior
Business ethics
Cognition
Cognition & reasoning
Descriptive ethics
Ethical behavior
Hypotheses
Intention-Behaviour relationships
Kohlbergs stages of moral development
Marketing
Moral development
Moral judgment
Moral relativism
Morality
Predictions
Predictors
Statistical variance
Studies
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Summary:The substantial work on cognitive moral development (CMD) by Lawrence Kohlberg and James Rest popularized the use of this construct in the literature on business ethics. This construct has been prominently used in models attempting to explain ethical/unethical behavior in management, marketing, and accounting, even though Kohlberg did not intend for the construct to be used in that manner. As a predictor of behavior, CMD has been attacked on the theoretical level, and its empirical performance has been weak. This article uses another established construct, which seems to satisfy the central criticisms of CMD, as a means of testing those complaints. The comparative multidimensional ethics scale (MES) substantially outperforms CMD, operationalized using Rest's Defining Issues Test, in every test. These results seem to suggest that other options perform better than CMD when the purpose is to model ethical/unethical behavior or even ethical judgment.
ISSN:1052-150X
2153-3326
DOI:10.2307/3857501