Ethical approaches and their application in hotel manager's decision making

Abstract

This study aims at evaluating the ethical approaches effective for managers working at hotel business when making decisions. Ethics in the working place refers to the rules of the workplace that an employee has to comply with along with the rules of society. In the study the concept of ethics has been examined within theories of ethics followed by a conceptual framework of making ethical decisions. The scope of the study consists of interviews conducted with 60 managers working in a chain hotel. The interview consists of 5 different scenarios relating to ethical dilemmas. The scenarios are composed of three different ethics approaches (moral justice approach subjective approach and contract -based theoretical approach). In the analysis of the data the Manova Analysis was carried out. The results suggest that managers prefer the contract -based theoretical approach more frequently in decision making. It was also found that managers differ in their choice of ethical approaches in terms of the scenarios. This difference is caused by subjective approaches which are used when dealing with problems related to socio-cultural and institutional reputation and ecology. © 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.