The effect of personality traits and mood of hotel managers on their ethical decision making

Hotel management keeps together employees, visitors and managers with many different cultures and thought systems together. Experiencing a lot of individual interactions has made the issue of ethics more sensitive. It is a known fact that unethical practices and decisions will affect the business, employees and consumers. The research has two fold purposes. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of personality traits and mood of hotel managers on ethical decision making and to examine the differences between research variables according to the characteristics of the managers. The research was conducted on 412 hotel managers on international five-star hotels operating in Istanbul. The relations between the variables were examined by establishing models and investigated with the structural equation model. The testing of structural equation models was performed with SmartPLS software programme. As a result of the research; a statistically significant relationships were found between the personality traits of extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience and emotional stability and the view of relativism in the same direction. A statistically significant relationship was found in the same direction between the personality trait of responsibility and the view of idealism. It has been observed that positive and negative emotional states have an indirect effect on the ethical decision making of hotel managers in general. Positive emotional states support hotel managers' decision making in a collaborative way. Negative emotional states has been found to reduce the view of relativism in some personality traits. There was no statistically significant difference between the positive and negative emotions of the hotel managers according to the departments they work in, and the views of idealism and relativism. Keywords: Ethics-Morality, Ethical Decision Making, Personality Traits, Emotional State, Hotel Management