Do Public-Sector and Private-Sector Personnel Have Different Ethical Dispositions? A Study of Two Sites

With the use of an instrument consisting of responses to eight vignettes, the authors of this study sampled ninety-two employees of a southern city's administration and 141 employees of a midwest financial firm regarding their predispositions to prefer deontological or consequentialist forms of ethical reasoning (or, more crudely, duties v. results). Contrary to theory, we found no difference between the public- and private-sector groups we studied. Furthermore, in contrast with the findings in earlier studies, we found that these respondents did not prefer consequentialist reasoning; in fact, both groups prefer deontological reasoning. Another hypothesis tested the relationship between (1) people's preferences for certain types of solutions to issues and (2) the forms of reasoning they use to arrive at those solutions. We found that preference for solution types was a stronger determinant of thinking for both groups than the type of rationale employed. This suggests that deontological and consequentialist categories do apply to behavior, but in ways different from what traditionally has been thought.