THE EFFECT OF ETHICAL SIGNALS ON RECRUITMENT ...

CHAPTER II
LITERATURE REVIEW
Ethics
The fields of philosophy and psychology have especially influenced business
ethics, the focus of the current research. Although business ethics research has seen an
increase in interest over the last 20 or 30 years, philosophers have been studying ethics
for several millennia. The following sections contain a review of the pertinent literature,
including definitional and conceptual issues.
The terms ethics, morals, and values are often used interchangeably, although
some researchers have attempted to differentiate among these terms. “Ethics” has its
origins in the Greek word, ethos, meaning “character, conduct or custom” and is closely
related to “morals,” from the Greek, mores, meaning “custom or habit” (McKinnon,
2007, p. 59). The terms ethics and morals are highly related. In fact, ethics can be
conceptualized as the “inquiry into the nature and grounds of morality” (Taylor, 1975,
p.1) or “thinking about morality, moral problems, and moral judgments” (Frankena,
1963, p. 3). Morality is concerned with good and bad actions as well as good and bad
motives behind those actions (Taylor, 1975). Together, ethics and morals form a branch
of philosophy concerned with the measurement and evaluation of right and wrong
(McKinnon, 2007). The terms ethics and morals will be used interchangeably for the
remainder of this paper. Values, on the other hand, are broader than morals or ethics.
Judge and Cable (1997) define values as “what an individual regards as conducive to his
or her welfare, and therefore what an individual wants or seeks to obtain” (p. 361). One
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