Earnings management as an ethical issue in view of Kohlberg’s theory of moral reasoning

The importance and implications of Kohlberg’s theory, in terms of earnings management, resides within the fact that the theory is concerned with questions about how one ought to act – being as it acknowledges the well-known ethical theories. The work of Kohlberg can be classified as a descriptive analysis to the extent that it attempts to describe individuals’ moral development. This integration of normative and descriptive ethics, in turn, enables the theory to be used to explore managers’ moral reasoning in a more helpful way. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on and introduce the ethics of earnings management in the academic community in light of Kohlberg’s theory. In other words, by analyzing the relevant literature to provide insights around the key concepts of the issue of ethics of earnings management. Therefore, theoretical approach has been adopted by reviewing the literature using a descriptive method. The study suggests relevance of the theory of moral development and reasoning by Kohlberg as an approach in the process of exploring the background and the reasons behind ethics of managers regarding earnings management. This theory helps to explain how individuals demonstrate and justify a sense of right or wrong. In general, the results show provides conceptual insights about the ethics of Earnings management, and it proposes a link between manager’s ethics regarding the phenomenon of Earnings management and the framework of moral reasoning theory by Kohlberg. From this point of view, it is possible to increase the concept of ethics reasoning about earnings management from a theoretical point of view.