Is the Delphi method valid for business ethics? A survey analysis
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Is the Delphi method valid for business ethics? A survey analysis Leire San-Jose 1,2
&
Jose Luis Retolaza 3
Received: 29 September 2016 / Accepted: 24 November 2016 # The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com
Abstract Although Delphi has come a long way in the development of the method itself, or even in business organisation, it has not been used at all in business ethics. To fill this gap, we have reviewed the literature on the use of Delphi in business, and particularly in the field of business ethics; we have also evidenced the method’s lack of use in this field, but noted its potential contribution to this research stream. An online survey has been administered to scholars in business ethics that have previously participated in a Delphi survey. The scholars come from nine different countries, and the survey has been held between January 2015 and March-June 2016. The findings show that in the experts’ opinion Delphi is as rigorous, appropriate and useful as any other research method in the field of business ethics, such as focus group, interviews, surveys (online) and case analysis. The Delphi method is assessed anonymously and economically by a group of experts dispersed around the world. Moreover, applying the Delphi method in business ethics could enrich the consensus on limiting the fuzzy area in which ethical business decisions (ethical decision-making) are argued
* Leire San-Jose [email protected] Jose Luis Retolaza [email protected] 1
University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, Avda. Lehendakari Agirre 83, 48015 Bilbao, Spain
2
University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, UK
3
Deusto Business School, Madrid, Spain
and determined. It is a way of facilitating the search for a solution to the ethical dilemmas delimiting a problem, which is a further advantage of the Delphi technique. Keywords Consensus . Ethical Decision-Making (EDM) . Management . Research method . Fuzzy
Introduction: is the Delphi method used in ethical decision-making? Based on the study by Rest [54], Jones [38] developed the concept of moral intensity, in which one of the six components consists of the social consensus that Bis defined as the degree of social agreement that a proposed act is evil (or good)^ [38: 375]. Many papers have subsequently focused on it; however, and following a review of the empirical literature containing ethical papers and on ethical decision-making conducted by Craft [15], it is confirmed that despite its multiple benefits (predicting technological advances, achieving a better understanding of a subject, and reaching a level of agreement on topics without conclusive information) the Delphi method has not been widely used either to analyse or to identify areas of agreement on ethical business decisions. Nevertheless, the Delphi method could be useful for research in business ethics, as it is now used in the business area, because of its potential in terms of consensus, feedback, and removing group pressure. There are both practical
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