Developing A Virtue Ethics Scale: Exploratory Survey of Philippine Managers

This paper is an exploratory attempt at generating a virtue ethics scale for managers from the Philippines, using the initial listing of Shanahan and Hyman (2003). The survey questionnaire consisting of 34 virtues was administered to a sample of 141 business and finance postgraduate students who are managers in the companies in Philippines. Based on the factor analysis of the responses to the items on the virtues questionnaire, the following were the resulting virtue or trait factors: (1) Care and concern, (2) Competence, (3) Ambition, and (4) Superiority. The four resulting virtue factors compare more or less with the virtue listings generated in the literature: “Care and concern” is analogous to “empathy” and “respect”; and “competence” seems akin to “integrity”, “trust”, and “reliability” in the literature. The results corroborate evidence in the Virtue Ethics literature that proposes the virtue theory as an improved ethical paradigm for business. It is indeed possible to augment teleological and deontological ethics scales with a virtue ethics scale that can cause both the researcher and the respondents to be more aware of the virtuous qualities of business people and managers. Such classifications can aid scale validation and development, which in turn could help push the strategic role of the virtue ethics theory.