Whatever You Do, Dont Get Caught?: A Study on the Link Between Guilt and Shame and Global Stage Development

• Main Authors: Andy Chiou, 邱于彥
• Other Authors: Shih-Chieh Fang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/94812891054532543707

碩士 === 國立成功大學 === 國際管理碩士在職專班 === 96 === While business ethics has recently become a popular field of study since the Enron scandal, not much empirical research has been done on whether differences in cross-cultural ethical and moral reasoning exist, and what might be the causes of these differences if they exist. McGregor in his popular book on investment and business opportunities in China, One Billion Customers, stated that such differences did exist, and were caused by how different cultures were shame or guilt oriented. According to McGregor, China was a shame culture, and hence capable of “almost anything as long as they don’t get caught.” These differences affected how businesses were to be conducted across national borders, in particular such problems as legal contracts, intellectual property, or business opportunities. There has already been a history of comparisons of shame and guilt culture and how behavior might differ between the two types of cultures. Benedict (1946) was one of the earliest scholars to define cultures as being either shame cultures or guilt cultures, with Japan being a true shame culture while the United States was a guilt culture. With the redefinition of shame and guilt as being distinct individual psychological emotions by Lewis (1971), new instruments have since been developed that allow for research to be conducted on the individual level in order to discover whether there truly are differences in shame- or guilt-proneness among individuals. This study will make use of recent psychological theories on shame and guilt in combination with Kohlberg’s (1981) cognitive theory of moral development (CMD), two well established subsets of study within psychology, in order to research shame and guilt effects upon behavior. This study will make use of Tangney and Dearing’s (2002) Test of Self-Conscious Affect-3 (TOSCA-3) in conjunction with Gibbs et al.’s (1984) Sociomoral Reflection Objective Measure (SROM) for the purposes of such study. Empirical research in this area should prove to be beneficial to the general understanding of ethical behavior, with possible applications in cross-cultural management.