Moral Imagination and Management Decision-Making: An Empirical Study from Pakistan

Moral Imagination is the mental ability to create or use ideas, images, discern moral aspects implanted within a situation and develop a range of possible solutions of the situation from a moral point of view.

Morality is basically the individual's perception of what is "good'' or "right.'' The human behaviours are determined by the environment. What so ever human is behaving is just because of its environmental factors (Rest, 1994).Moral Imagination is the mental ability to create or use ideas, images, discern moral aspects implanted within a situation and develop a range of possible solutions of the situation from a moral point of view (Werhane, 1998; Werhane, 2002; Heath, 2008; Mehalik and Gorman, 2006).

Werhane (1998) elaborately presents the idea of moral imagination as a person's ability to discern and understand a particular situation with all its possible dimensions. Moreover none of the solutions should be contextualized. The solutions should be evaluated from all the angles, keeping in mind the moral aspects so that those do not bring forth aftermaths on humanity. If an individual is morally imaginative then he will be able to stimulate his careful approach that stimulates new thinking on the situation, a negative response of scripts, and the noticing of ethical consequences (Caldwell and Moberg, 2007).

In this research, management decision makers were taken into consideration to dig out the factors that are affecting the decision-making process of management. Business Industry has witnessed good and bad business leader, those who have taken good moral decisions that result in mutual benefit to the company and wider society and those who have taken bad moral decision that results in wider damage to the society as well as business. Mostly managers lack the ability to imagine a range of possible issues, consequences and solutions. So just because of their shorter insight and limited conceptual schema they make wrong moral decisions which later give undesirable impacts to society and business as well.

In our country Pakistan Easy Paisa is one the biggest example of moral imagination and management decision-making. This came in existence with the joint venture of Telenor, Telecommunication Company and Tameer bank. Easy Paisa helps the poor especially in getting the salary of their kids on time and villagers can also transfer money through this scheme (Easy paisa, 2010). The concept behind this scheme was to accept their social corporate responsibility and work for the benefit of society in such a way that it will give benefit to company also. Usually decision makers don't discern such kind of issues and don't think that this may be a big issue for the society. It is the utmost obligation of any decision maker to discern the moral issues and look in to their consequences and then come up with the solutions instead of waiting for