Cross‐Cultural Differences in the Perceived Morality of Accounting Manipulations: The Effect of Acculturation

In a world of increasingly global commerce, individual managers frequently migrate permanently to a new place of work. Over time, they acculturate—they learn and acquire the values of their host culture. The differences between national cultures' norms concerning the morality of questionable (by North American norms) accounting practices, and the ways in which individuals' beliefs about the morality of such action change as they settle into a new culture, are not well understood. This paper presents an exploratory study of the acculturation process with respect to accounting ethics of Chinese managers moving to Canada for an extended period of time. We test for two effects: first, for differences in ethical perceptions and intentions between members of the two cultures resident in their country of birth, and second, the effect of a significant acculturation effect on the Chinese group resulting from their living in Canada and studying in a North American MBA program for approximately one year. We find two acculturation effects. First, Chinese managers perceived a questionable cost accounting allocation to be more ethical than the Chinese in Canada. Although there was no significant difference in an overall measure of morality, investigation of this effect among various moral schema identified some perceptions of utilitarianism, moral Tightness and self‐interest to be significantly different among those Chinese who had spent one year in Canada compared to those in China, and closer to the beliefs of the Canadian‐born managers. We also found an acculturation effect relating to intention to take a questionable action. While there was no significant difference in intention between the Canadian‐born and Chinese in China, the newly‐arrived Chinese in Canada were significantly more willing to take the questionable action. This result was robust to controls for social desirability bias, gender and work experience. We conclude that reasoning processes differ between Chinese and Canadian managers, and are affected by an intense one‐year acculturation process (the first year of a North American MBA program). However, the acculturation process of the Chinese in Canada appeared to result in their greater willingness to undertake a questionable cost allocation than either their Canadian‐born or Chinese in China colleagues.