The purpose of this paper is to study the Machiavellianism of undergraduates and how it relates to their attitudes about hypothetical marketing moral dilemmas.
The 309 participants are presented with nine ethical scenarios after completing the Mach IV scale.
As hypothesized, undergraduates low in Machiavellianism believe the ethically questionable action is wrong, anticipate guilt if they consider doing the same thing, and say they would not do it. All correlations are significant at the 0.01 level (two‐tail).
Organizations can use the data to increase their global competitiveness.
The investigation is the first to assess the association of Machiavellianism and purely marketing moral scenarios. Educators can focus business ethics training on high Machs.
