Religiosity and Moral Identity: The Mediating Role of Self-Control Scott John Vitell Mark N. Bing H. Kristl Davison Anthony P. Ammeter Bart L. Garner Milorad M. Novicevic ABSTRACT. The ethics literature has identified moral motivation as a factor in ethical decision-making. Fur- thermore, moral identity has been identified as a source of moral motivation. In the current study, we examine religiosity as an antecedent to moral identity and examine the mediating role of self-control in this relationship. We find that intrinsic and extrinsic dimensions of religiosity have different direct and indirect effects on the internal- ization and symbolization dimensions of moral identity. Specifically, intrinsic religiosity plays a role in counter- balancing the negative impact of extrinsic religiosity on the internalization of moral identity. Further, intrinsic religiosity also counterbalances the negative and indirect impact of extrinsic religiosity on symbolization of moral identity via self-control. Lastly, self-control does not play a mediating role in the impact of religiosity on the internalization dimension of moral identity. We conclude that this study presents important findings that advance our understanding of the antecedents of moral identity, and that these results may have implications for the understanding of ethical decision-making. KEY WORDS: ethics, religiosity, moral identity, self- control Introduction Moral identity has emerged as an important construct with the potential for predicting ethical judgments, intentions, and even moral actions in situations involving ethical issues (Trevino et al., 2006; Weaver, 2006). Moral identity is defined as one’s self-concept ‘‘organized around a set of moral traits,’’ such as compassion, fairness, generosity, and honesty (Aquino and Reed, 2002; Reed et al., 2007). In general, moral identity can be understood as a ‘‘kind of self-regulatory mechanism that motivates moral action’’ (Aquino and Reed, 2002, p. 1423). Based upon prior research on moral motivation and religi- osity, in this study we look at religiosity as an ante- cedent to moral identity and examine the mediating role of self-control in this relationship. Given the business background of the above authors, we par- ticularly examine the business ethics literature and use a sample of business students in our study. In contrast to moral reasoning and even moral emotions, moral identity, as a relatively new con- struct, especially in the business literature, is an ‘‘understudied’’ source of moral motivation (Reed et al., 2007). The ethical implications of individual moral motivation have been of interest to ethics theoreticians and researchers for a relatively long period of time when compared to the interest in moral identity. Driven in part by both societal and organizational concerns, as well as academic inquis- itiveness, business scholars have shown an interest in ethics as a research area for well over two decades. For example, in that time, several theories in ethics have been developed (e.g., Dubinsky and Loken, 1989; Ferrell and Gresham, 1985; Hunt and Vitell, 1986, 1993), and numerous empirical studies investigating the ethical decision-making processes of business professionals have been conducted (e.g., Hunt and Vasquez-Parraga, 1993; Mayo and Marks, 1990; Singhapakdi 1999). Because of its relatively nascent appearance in the literature, one construct that has not yet been Journal of Business Ethics (2009) 88:601–613 Ó Springer 2008 DOI 10.1007/s10551-008-9980-0