The Role of Religiosity, Ethnicity and Gender Identification in Individual’s Moral Judgments; The Mediation Effect of Self-transcendence

Abstract

Most recently, corporate financial scandals, and unethical behaviour cast doubt on investors and raised public concern globally. It is due to the weak corporate governance structure and low ethic awareness amongst the people. The purpose of this research is therefore to justify the factors that influence an individual’s moral judgement. This study also seeks to provide practical recommendations to corporations and different associations. As such, to evaluate the proposed hypotheses, 300 self-administered questionnaires were distributed in five universities in Malaysia using a non-probability sampling approach. As a result, the findings demonstrate that ethnicity has the highest impact on self-transcendence and moral judgement, followed by religiosity and gender identification (gender difference). The contribution of this research is to evaluate the relationships between religiosity, ethnicity, and gender identification towards moral judgement with the intervention of mediating variable (self-transcendence). In essence, ethical values and moral obligations should be highlighted in corporations, and these values should be practised and embraced into the organisational culture. Thus, organisational decision-makers should highly emphasise the role of ethicality and morality in corporations because ethical competence aligns with an employee’s responsibility as a whole.