Creating Managerial Ethical Profiles: An Exploratory Cluster Analysis

Abstract

This study profiles managers according to the ethical criteria they bring to their managerial decision making. Profiling was based on exploratory cluster analysis of responses of academics & students and small business managers to a multidimensional questionnaire. The data were collected through a self-reporting survey (n=82) administrated to the two cohorts. An agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis was then performed to the two groups separately on the 8 ethical subscales from the Managerial Ethical Profile (MEP). Between-groups linkage method and squared binary Euclidean distance measures were used to cluster groups in the given data sets. Five clusters were found as an optimal number for the given data set for one cohort and four for the other cohort. Four clusters were common to both cohorts. The study concluded that a cluster analysis was useful method for finding the natural grouping of not well understood influences of ethical principles in decision making, and their representativeness with common practice. Further study with a larger sample on identifying distinct variables that defined clusters will provide better understanding of ethical principles influencing managerial decision making.