Luppo Kuillman

General Introduction 11 1 al., 2018). With these Master-trained clinicians in place, both have their professional association and consequently, own code of professional conduct. Incorporated in these codes of conduct is the statement that NPs and PAs have knowledge about and know how to deal with ethical issues in practice. However, the manner in which both professionals (NPs and PAs) deal with ethical issues in their work-setting has neither been researched nor been reported about as such, and therefore became the populations of interest. 1.2 A plethora of Models on Ethical Decision-making With regard to empirical studies in researching ethical decision-making, two landmark review papers were published and these were extensively cited since then. Both papers report on empirical literature concerning ethical decision-making, both however having two distinct timeframes of inclusion. Whereas O’Fallon and Butterfield reviewed the literature from 1996 to 2003, Jana Craft, in her report, included papers that were published between 2004 and 2011. (Craft, 2013; O’Fallon & Butterfield, 2013). With these papers spanning an impressive 15 year period, a similarly staggering number of empirical studies (respectively: n =174 and n =84) were included, accompanied by multiple theoretical models, containing numerous constructs of interests within these. Both the work of O’Fallon and Butterfield, as also Craft’s paper, chose to categorize the literature by way of plausible constructs that represent the ethical decision-making process, namely: 1) awareness/recognition, 2) judgement/reasoning, 3) moral intent, and 4) behavior. Both reviews also provide insight into the many individual factors, such as age, gender, locus of control and many others, the function of which are dependent on these variables. Even though more recent literature sheds a new light on ethical decision-making as being a rather more non-deliberate chain of processes including intuition, identity and biases (Moore & Gino, 2015), for this doctoral thesis the Four Component Model of Moral Behavior (FCM), however, serves as a foundation for the conducted research. For the simple reason of keeping in close connection with the amount of literature available, this doctoral thesis is predominantly influenced by the FCM (J. R. Rest, Thoma, & Bebeau, 1999), as well as by Albert Bandura’s moral disengagement theory (Bandura, 1999) and some other antecedent constructs of ethical decision-making have been included since they were assumed to also explain ethical behavior. The rationale for extending the FCM will be further explained in the next paragraph.