Impact of business-students subconscious in ethical decision-making

Abstract

A usual management task in organizations is decision-making, and some of the most important decisions made by business leaders involve ethical components. Our behavioral-ethics-field research explores the business students (BS) subconscious influence in the ethical decision-making processes applying cases reporting ethical dilemmas. A questionnaire with neutral or non-neutral images acting as subliminal stimuli was administered to 30+30 BS trying to find out about the ethical maturity level in decision-making processes and the subconscious influences in these decisions. Cognitive biases and BS metacognitive strategies were identified when non-neutral images were present. The effects of subconscious in BS ethical decision-making are discussed.