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Religiosity, spirituality and ethical decision-making: Perspectives from executives in Indian multinational enterprises

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Abstract

Through a semi-structured interview with 40 senior executives from Indian multinational enterprises (MNEs), we use virtue ethics theory to examine the types of virtues that are promulgated by religiosity and spirituality in shaping ethical behavior. The responses were coded in NVivo and the themes and concepts were organized into four categories (e.g., environmental context, individual religious virtues, individual non-religious spiritual virtues, and organizational ethical virtues). These categories contributed to ethical decision-making. The findings suggest that it is critical to understand ethical decision-making by identifying virtues that are important in religious, spiritual, and humanistic contexts in countries such as India, which are religiously and spiritually diverse. The study findings assist in the development of a framework of ethical decision-making that can be used for further empirical testing across both non-Western and Western contexts in multi-faith populations. Several theoretical, practical, and methodological contributions are presented along with suggestions for future research.

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Acknowledgments

We are indebted to the Special issue editors and two anonymous reviewers who have helped us improve our paper through the review process.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Curtin Business School, Curtin University, Kent St, Bentley, Western Australia, 6102, Australia

    Subramaniam Ananthram

  2. School of Human Resource Management, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada

    Christopher Chan

  3. Faculty of Business, Australian Catholic University, North Sydney Campus (MacKillop) Level 4, 21 Berry Street, Sydney, New South Wales, 2060, Australia

    Christopher Chan

  4. Institut de Gestion de Rennes, Université de Rennes 1, 11 rue Jean Macé, 35708, Rennes, Cedex 7, France

    Christopher Chan

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Revised paper submitted to the Special Issue of Asia Pacific Journal of Management titled “Indigenous management research in Asia”

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Ananthram, S., Chan, C. Religiosity, spirituality and ethical decision-making: Perspectives from executives in Indian multinational enterprises. Asia Pac J Manag 33, 843–880 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-016-9460-5

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