Abstract
In the last two decades, business ethics has drawn increased interest from business practitioners as well as from academicians. While some of this interest has resulted in research that focuses on employees' perceptions of the ethical appropriateness of business practices, research investigating employees' ethical beliefs, ideologies and orientation have been limited. Additionally, despite the repeated call in the literature for cross-cultural research in this age of globalization, a limited number of studies have examined the ethical beliefs and ideologies of foreign workers. This exploratory study partially fills this ‘gap’ in the literature by investigating the ethical beliefs, preferred ethical ideology, and degree of Machiavellianism of 365 employees from three Middle Eastern countries. Results from a series of regression analyses suggest that one's choice of action in an ethics related situation is explained by the individual's ethical orientation.