Research Note and Review of the Empirical Ethical Decision-Making Literature: Boundary Conditions and Extensions Kevin Lehnert • Yung-hwal Park • Nitish Singh Received: 18 November 2013 / Accepted: 9 March 2014 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014 Abstract In business ethics, there is a large body of lit- erature focusing on the conditions, factors, and influences in the ethical decision-making processes. This work builds upon the past critical reviews by updating and extending the literature review found in Craft’s (J Bus Ethics 117(2):221–259, 2013) study, extending her literature review to include a total of 141 articles. Since past reviews have focused on categorizing results based upon various independent variables, we instead synthesize and look at the trends of these based upon the four ethical decision making categories: Awareness, Behavior, Judgment, and Intention. We focus on the moderation (30 studies) and mediation (23 studies) effects found within these studies and provide an in-depth analysis of future trends. Fur- thermore, we also highlight key statistical and methodological concerns, outline overarching trends, and directions of future research in empirical ethical decision making. Keywords Meta-review Á Ethical decision making Á Empirical analysis Á Methods Introduction Ethical decision making has long been studied, both through a descriptive philosophical or theological lens and throughout a myriad of particular disciplines (i.e., business; medical; athletics; and artistic). In business ethics, there is a large body of literature focusing on the conditions, fac- tors, and influences to the ethical decision-making pro- cesses. So much so, that in the Journal of Business Ethics, there has been no less than four extensive meta-reviews of the literature relating to the empirical ethical decision- making literature (Ford and Richardson 1994; Loe et al. 2000; O’Fallon and Butterfield 2005; Craft 2013), covering close to 400 different empirical studies on the topic. This is to say nothing of myriad theoretical studies on the matter. One would think that with such a large body of research, the topic would be exhausted and the matter closed. However, that is most certainly not the case. A cursory examination of these reviews shows that over the last 35 years, researchers have worked to delineate the circumstances, influences, and boundary conditions within ethical decision making. These conditions have ranged from demographic components such as gender (Pierce and Sweeney 2010; Valentine and Rittenburg 2007), age (El- ango et al. 2010; Forte 2004), and religion (Kurpis et al. 2008; Rawwas et al. 2006), to more psychographic com- ponents such as personal values (Marques and Azevedo- Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10551-014-2147-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. K. Lehnert (&) Department of Marketing, Seidman College of Business, Grand Valley State University, L. William Seidman Center 3116, 50 Front Ave. SW, Grand Rapids, MI 49504, USA e-mail: lehnertk@gvsu.edu Y. Park Department of Business Administration, School of Business, Truman State University, 100 E. Normal St. VH 2324, Kirksville, MO 63501, USA e-mail: yhpark@truman.edu N. Singh John Cook School of Business, Saint Louis University, 3674 Lindell Blvd., Davis-Shaughnessy Hall, 334D, Saint Louis, MO 63108, USA e-mail: singhn2@slu.edu 123 J Bus Ethics DOI 10.1007/s10551-014-2147-2