Ethical decision-making under stress: the role of the nonreactive facet of mindfulness.

Business students commonly experience high levels of stress, often facing a variety of ethical challenges throughout their education experiences and well into their professional lives. Complicating matters, past research shows that such stress may compromise the processes associated with individual ethical decision-making (EDM). Some research indicates that individual differences, namely mindfulness, can benefit EDM. However, few if any studies have considered how mindfulness may mitigate adverse effects of stress on EDM. Many models of the EDM process have assumed a primary role for cognitive reasoning, while many models of moral decision-making explicitly consider intuitive responses as a dominant factor. Drawing on dual-process theory, we propose that perceived stress undermines the EDM process by shifting processing away from controlled, deliberative cognition toward more automatic, intuitive responses. Critically, the nonreactive facet of mindfulness serves as a mediating mechanism that enables individuals to pause these automatic reactions and engage in more reflective evaluation. Mindfulness is a multi-faceted construct, and its nonreactive facet is of particular interest because it may delay automatic intuitive responses, thereby facilitating cognitive evaluations, prior to response. We empirically evaluated competing hypotheses that the nonreactive facet of mindfulness would either partially or fully mediate the effect of stress on the EDM process in a sample of 261 Midwestern USA university business students. Structural equation modeling and mediation analysis supported a fully mediated model, suggesting that nonreactive mindfulness mediates the relationship between stress and the EDM process among business management students. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, as are the study's limitations and suggestions for future research.