Ethics in Management Accounting: Moving toward Ethical Motivation

Abstract

In today’s business environment, the role of accountants is significant. Managers and other decision makers base their decisions mainly on information that accountants provide. Since accuracy of decisions depends on the reliability of accounting information, the ethical dimension of the profession has gained considerable attention recently. In fact, management accountants are required to make ethical choices in many settings. Base on the Rest’s model that is an ethical decision making’s model, 4 inner psychological processes (ethical sensitivity, judgment, motivation and character) together give rise to outwardly observable behavior. Professional organizations like IMA^[1] support management accountants in recognizing and solving specific situations or dilemmas which management accountants may encounter by preparing codes of ethics and teaching them. But, ethics education solely does not lead to a success in the emergence of ethical behavior. An individual’s willingness and motivation has been recognized as a crucial factor in engaging in ethical decision making. With regard to the importance and position of motivation in ethical decisions it requires to special attention, nonetheless most of the studies have been concentrated on two first dimensions, ethical sensitivity and judgment. Therefore, this paper is intended to recognize some of important and influential factors on ethical motivation of management accountants and to explain the relations between these factors and also relationship between these factors with the motivation in rest’ model. It’s noticeable that organizations have a critical and basic role in ethical motivation of their own employees. finally, in order to ethical motivation of management accountants, guidelines will be presented that implementing and performing these recommendations by organizations can result in motivation and consequently ethical intention of management accountants.

Keywords: Management accounting, Ethical decisions, Rest’ model, Ethical motivation

[1] Institute of Management Accountants