Measuring Ethical Reasoning of IT Professionals and Students

Information technology (IT) professionals are entrusted with the design, implementation, and operation of the information systems that support key business processes within organizations. Many organizational stakeholders such as management, investors, and regulators expect these professionals to act ethically, as these systems must accurately reflect all business activity. This expectation has been particularly heightened in the early 2000s due to the substantial business scandals in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. For example, in 2001 fraudulent financial practices by the now defunct U.S. energy trading company, Enron, rocked the financial markets so hard that the Congress of the United States enacted sweeping reforms in 2002 through the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX, 2002). As McLean and Elkind (2004) observe, this law includes several provisions aimed at ensuring the integrity of information and business process support in organizational information systems. Concerns about unethical business activity are not endemic to the United States, as exemplified by the financial frauds unearthed at the Italian food distribution company, Parmalat, and the Dutch international supermarket company, Royal Ahold. With increased reliance on IT professionals to support and record business process activity, companies must be able to expect ethical behavior by those they charge with this responsibility. However, it is not always clear how their ethical behavior can be measured. The purpose of this essay is to describe instruments to measure ethical reasoning of IT professionals. In particular, we describe a generally supported model in the literature (Rest, 1994) that posits that ethical reasoning is a key component of ethical behavior that can be measured, and which is also significantly correlated with ethical action (see Thoma, 1994, for a review). bACKGROUND