Cognitive Moral Development and Japanese Procurement Executives - Implications For Industrial Marketers

With the importance of Japan to the world economy, and the attractiveness of Japanese corporations as buyers of U.S. industrial products, it is vital for industrial marketers to understand the ethical predispositions of Japanese purchasing executives. A ground-breaking sample of 222 purchasing executives from the largest Japanese corporations was obtained and assessed in terms of their cognitive moral development (CMD). The findings indicated: (1) the Japanese were more focused on the conventional level than on the postconventional level of CMD, (2) older executives were less concerned with group harmonization, and (3) upper management focused less on mutually satisfying outcomes and group harmonization than middle or lower levels. Benchmarking against previous research involving Chinese and American business executives, this study found that the Japanese approach moral judgment differently from either of the other populations. In particular the Japanese were more focused on stage 3 (interpersonal concordance) than the other samples, while they were less focused (along with the Americans) than the Chinese for stage 4 (law and duty to the social order). These differences were also seen for stage 5a (social contract) with the Japanese and Chinese scoring lower than the Americans and for 5b (intuitive humanism) with the Chinese scoring higher than the Japanese or the Americans. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved