The Interrelation between Material and Spiritual and Ethical Decision-Making

The necessity of complying with ethics principles in accountants’ decision making process makes it very important to study the factors influencing ethical accountants’ decision making. This study is aimed at examining the potential relation between materialism، outward and inward religiosity and accountants’ ethical decision-making. This is a descriptive and correlation research. The statistical population of the survey consists of all accounting students in universities located in the city of Tehran. A sample composed of Two hundred and fifty nine accounting students were selected randomly from the population. Data were collected using a standard questionnaire. Firstly، data were assembled using factor analysis and then hypotheses were tested using regression method. The results show that all three factors including materialism، outward and inward religiosity and the ethical judgment of people are significantly related with accounting students’ ethical orientations. While، ethical judgment and inward religiosity are directly related to ethical orientations، “outward religiosity” and “materialism” are inversely related to it. Considering the direct relationship between people’s ethical orientations and their inward religiosity and ethical judgment، as well as the importance of ethical behavior of accountants، it seems that، the propagation of ethical principles grounded on religious teachings in the accounting syllabus may improve the commitment of accounting students to their ethics principles.