The Relationship between the Religiosity and the Ethical Attitudes of Managers: An Empirical Study

In this study, we aimed to explore the relationship between religiosity and business ethics. Two dimensions of religiosity – intrinsic an extrinsic- were studied. We mainly tested one hypothesis: whether ethical attitudes are affected by religiosity. However, we also explored the relationship between ethical attitudes, intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity and various demographic measures of the participants.In our study, we surveyed 510 managers and white-collar workers from 6 different organizations in Turkey. Our survey instruments have three parts. First part included 24-vignette ethics scale of Barnett and Brown (1994). Second part included 14-item religiosity scale of Allport and Ross (1967). Third part contained various demographic measures. Findings of the study show that intrinsic religiosity is partly and negatively correlated with ethical attitudes and extrinsic religiosity is positively related to the ethical attitudes. In other words, intrinsically motivated people are more prone to behave ethically than extrinsically motivated people are