Ethical Culture,Ethical Intent,and Organizational Citizenship Behavior: The Moderating and Mediating Role of Person–Organization Fit

A multidimensional measure of ethical culture (EC) was examined for its relationship to person–organization (P–O) fit, ethical intent and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), using a sample of 525 employees from the financial industry in Spain. As hypothesized, relative to studies using unidimensional assessments, our measure of EC was more strongly related to ethical intent and organizational citizenship. Also, significant differences were found in the degree to which each the EC dimensions related to both ethical intent and OCB. Finally, in a first for the literature, we demonstrated the important role of overall P–O fit in connection with EC, ethical intent, and organizational citizenship. Specifically, as hypothesized, P–O fit moderated positively the association between EC and ethical intent, but mediated the EC–OCB relationship.     

Person–Organization Fit on Prosocial Identity: Implications on Employee Outcomes

This study examined the relationship between person–organization (PO) fit on prosocial identity (prosocial PO fit) and various employee outcomes. The results of polynomial regression analysis based on a sample of 589 hospital employees, which included medical doctors, nurses, and staff, indicate joint effects of personal and organizational prosocial identity on the development of a sense of organizational identification and on the engagement in prosocial behaviors toward colleagues, organizations, and patients. Specifically, prosocial PO fit had a curvilinear relationship with organizational identification, such that organizational identification increased as organizational prosocial characteristics increased toward personal prosocial identity and then decreased when the organizational prosocial characteristics exceeded the personal prosocial identity. In addition, organizational identification and prosocial behaviors increased as both personal and organizational prosocial identity increased from low to high.     

Leaders’ Moral Competence and Employee Outcomes: The Effects of Psychological Empowerment and Person–Supervisor Fit

This study examined how leaders’ moral competence is linked to employees’ task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors. Based on a sample of 102 employee–supervisor pairs from seven organizations in South Korea, the results of this study revealed that leaders’ moral competence was positively associated with employees’ task performance and organizational citizenship behaviors toward leaders (OCBS). As expected, employees’ psychological empowerment partially mediated the relationship between leaders’ moral competence and employees’ task performance and OCBS. Furthermore, person–supervisor fit (PS fit) moderated the relationship between leaders’ moral competence and employees’ psychological empowerment such that the relationships became stronger for individuals higher rather than lower in PS fit.     

Examining the Effects of Moral Development Level,Self-Concept,and Self-Monitoring on Consumers’ Ethical Attitudes

This study investigates the possible effects of self-concept, self-monitoring, and moral development level on dimensions of consumers’ ethical attitudes. “Actively benefiting from illegal activities,” “actively benefiting from deceptive practices,” and “no harm/no foul 1–2” are defined by factor analysis as four dimensions of Turkish consumers’ ethical attitudes. Logistic regression analysis is applied to data collected from 516 Turkish households. Results indicate that self-monitoring and moral development level predicted consumer ethics in relation to “actively benefiting from questionable practices” and “no harm/no foul” dimensions. Actual self-concept is also a predictor variable in relation to “no harm/no foul” dimension. Age and gender make significant differences in consumers’ ethical attribute dimensions.     

The Influence of Business School’s Ethical Climate on Students’ Unethical Behavior

Business schools play an instrumental role in laying the foundations for ethical behavior and socially responsible actions in the business community. Drawing on social learning and identity theories and using data collected from undergraduate business students (n = 318), we found that ethical climate was a significant predictor of unethical behavior, such that students with positive perceptions about their business school’s ethical climate were more likely to refrain from unethical behaviors. Moreover, we found that high moral and institutional identities strengthened the effect of ethical climate on unethical behavior. In addition to novel theoretical contributions to the business ethics and socio-psychology literature, this study offers practical pathways through which business schools can nurture and instill the values and behaviors that ultimately help shape positive organizational ethics. Directions for future research are provided.     

Ethical Attitudes of Accounting Practitioners: Are Rank and Ethical Attitudes Related?

We address a previous finding in the business ethics literature in which accounting professionals in higher rank levels, i.e., “manager” or “partner” of auditing firms, appear to have lower moral reasoning ability than their junior counterparts. Prior investigations have relied upon a similar methodology for estimating ethical beliefs, namely testing “moral reasoning ability” using either the Moral Judgment Interview or Defining Issues Test. In the present study, we use a multiple vignettes approach to test for the existence of the inverse rank-ethical beliefs effect. With only 2 of the 30 vignettes resulting in both managers and partners being more accepting of the ethically charged behaviors, the results presented here using this alternative methodology are generally not supportive of the inverse rank-ethical beliefs phenomenon. We also use a multivariate analysis in order to control for demographic characteristics. Our results suggest that the most robust predictor of ethical attitudes among accounting practitioners is age, not rank within a firm.     

Impact of Ethical Leadership and Leader–Member Exchange on Whistle Blowing: The Moderating Impact of the Moral Intensity of the Issue

Given the prevalence of corporate frauds and the significance of whistle blowing as a mechanism to report about the frauds, the present study explores the impact of ethical leadership and leader–member exchange (LMX) on whistle blowing. Additionally, the article also explores the moderating role of the moral intensity [studied as magnitude of consequences (MOC)] of the issue on this relationship. The article reports results of three experimental studies conducted on the postgraduate students of a premier technology institute in India. Ethical leadership, LMX, and moral intensity are manipulated through scenarios. Study one (n = 81) manipulates ethical leadership (ethical/unethical) and quality of LMX (low and high) as independent variables; study two (n = 80) manipulates ethical leadership and moral intensity (high and low MOC), and study three (n = 87) manipulates LMX and MOCs to assess their individual and joint effects on whistle blowing. Results show that not only do ethical leadership and LMX predict whistle blowing, but these relationships get moderated by the moral intensity of the issue as well.     

The Relationships of Empathy,Moral Identity and Cynicism with Consumers’ Ethical Beliefs: The Mediating Role of Moral Disengagement

This study examines the relationships of empathy, moral identity and cynicism with the following dimensions of consumer ethics: the passive dimension (passively benefiting at the expense of the seller), the active/legal dimension (benefiting from questionable but legal actions), the ‘no harm, no foul’ dimension (actions that do not harm anyone directly but are considered unethical by some) and the ‘doing-good’/recycling dimension (pro-social actions). A survey of six hundred Australian consumers revealed that both empathy and moral identity were related to negative beliefs regarding the passive and the active/legal dimensions of consumer ethics and were related to positive beliefs regarding the ‘doing-good’/recycling dimension. Cynicism was related to positive beliefs regarding the passive dimension of consumer ethics and was related to negative beliefs regarding the ‘doing-good’/recycling dimension. The role of moral disengagement in mediating these relationships was examined. Empathy and moral identity were only indirectly negatively related to the ‘no harm, no foul’ dimension of consumer ethics through moral disengagement, while cynicism was indirectly positively related to this dimension through moral disengagement. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

The Role of Individual Variables,Organizational Variables and Moral Intensity Dimensions in Libyan Management Accountants’ Ethical Decision Making

This study investigates the association of a broad set of variables with the ethical decision making of management accountants in Libya. Adopting a cross-sectional methodology, a questionnaire including four different ethical scenarios was used to gather data from 229 participants. For each scenario, ethical decision making was examined in terms of the recognition, judgment and intention stages of Rest’s model. A significant relationship was found between ethical recognition and ethical judgment and also between ethical judgment and ethical intention, but ethical recognition did not significantly predict ethical intention—thus providing support for Rest’s model. Organizational variables, age and educational level yielded few significant results. The lack of significance for codes of ethics might reflect their relative lack of development in Libya, in which case Libyan companies should pay attention to their content and how they are supported, especially in the light of the under-development of the accounting profession in Libya. Few significant results were also found for gender, but where they were found, males showed more ethical characteristics than females. This unusual result reinforces the dangers of gender stereotyping in business. Personal moral philosophy and moral intensity dimensions were generally found to be significant predictors of the three stages of ethical decision making studied. One implication of this is to give more attention to ethics in accounting education, making the connections between accounting practice and (in Libya) Islam. Overall, this study not only adds to the available empirical evidence on factors affecting ethical decision making, notably examining three stages of Rest’s model, but also offers rare insights into the ethical views of practising management accountants and provides a benchmark for future studies of ethical decision making in Muslim majority countries and other parts of the developing world.     

Investigating the Effects of Gender on Consumers’ Moral Philosophies and Ethical Intentions

Using information collected from a convenience sample of graduate and undergraduate students affiliated with a Midwestern university in the United States, this study determined the extent to which gender (defined as sex differences) is related to consumers’ moral philosophies and ethical intentions. Multivariate and univariate results indicated that women were more inclined than men to utilize both consequence-based and rule-based moral philosophies in questionable consumption situations. In addition, women placed more importance on an overall moral philosophy than did men, and women had higher intentions to behave ethically. The marketing and practical implications of these findings are discussed, and the limitations of the research are presented along with several suggestions for future inquiry, which could advance current understanding of consumer ethics.     

The Influence of an Observer’s Value Orientation and Personality Type on Attitudes Toward Whistleblowing

This study examines the influence of an observer’s value orientation and personality type on attitudes toward whistleblowing. Based on a review of the literature we generated three hypotheses to explain the relationship between these two factors and attitudes toward whistleblowing, and these were tested using data collected from 490 university students in South Korea. The survey comprises two parts, a measure of MBTI personality types, and a section assessing value orientations and attitudes toward whistleblowing. Regression analysis was conducted to clarify the influence of the independent variables. The study offers two main contributions. First, it examines what role an observer’s value orientation and personality type play in determining the attitudes. Second, it provides insights into designing customized ethical training programs and developing policy aimed at changing negative attitudes toward whistleblowing.     

The Impact of Caring Climate,Job Satisfaction,and Organizational Commitment on Job Performance of Employees in a China’s Insurance Company

This research uses structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the direct and indirect relationships among caring climate, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job performance of 476 employees working in a Chinese insurance company. The SEM result showed that caring climate had a significant direct impact on job satisfaction, organizational command, and job performance. Caring climate also had a significant indirect impact on organizational commitment through the mediating role of job satisfaction, and on job performance through the mediating role of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. In addition, job satisfaction had significant direct impact on organizational commitment, through which it also had a significant indirect impact on job performance. Finally, organizational commitment had a significant direct impact on job performance.     

How Ethical Leadership Shapes Employees’ Job Performance: The Mediating Roles of Goal Congruence and Psychological Capital

Drawing from research on ethical leadership, psychological capital, and social learning theory, this study investigated the mediating effects of goal congruence and psychological capital in the link between supervisors’ ethical leadership style and followers’ in-role job performance. Data captured from 171 employees and 24 supervisors showed that ethical leadership has a positive effect on followers’ in-role job performance, yet this effect is explained through the role of psychological capital and follower–leader goal congruence, providing evidence of mediation. These findings have significant implications for research and practice.     

The Influence of Organizations’ Tax Avoidance Practices on Consumers’ Behavior: The Role of Moral Reasoning Strategies,Political Ideology,and Brand Identification

Journal of Business Ethics - This study adopts moral reasoning strategies (moral rationalization and decoupling) to investigate why consumers support companies involved in ethical transgressions....     

The Role of Commodified Celebrities in Children’s Moral Development: The Case of David Beckham

This paper presents an existentialist interpretation of the identity constituting meanings that middle‐class men and women ascribe to their bodies and their related motivations to engage in consumption activities that seek to transform their embodied selves. We begin by describing the relevance of the existential conceptualization of the embodied self to the postmodern condition of consumer culture. We apply this existential perspective to discern three dialectically structured themes drawn from phenomenological interviews with men and women across a broad age range. One emergent and unexpected finding is the extent to which these men and women expressed a constellation of common body image anxieties, thematic meanings, and self‐critical, objectifying interpretations of their bodies. Based on these findings and historical considerations, we propose that men's embodied selves are, like women's, fully inscribed in the patriarchal discourses that circulate throughout postmodern consumer culture. However, men occupy a distinct social space and, accordingly, we argue that their embodied selves are uniquely situated in a cultural model of hegemonic masculinity. We conclude that the postmodern ideal of the plastic, transformable body has become a resonant cultural metaphor through which middle‐class consumers enact their identity projects of creating a desired embodied self.     

What Sparks Ethical Decision Making? The Interplay Between Moral Intuition and Moral Reasoning: Lessons from the Scholastic Doctrine

There has been limited coverage of the corporate responsibility (CR) practices of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the mainstream CR literature. Furthermore, there has been no systematic analysis of the responsibilities of the high value jewellery industry and jewellery SMEs in particular. This study explores the potential for harm and value creation by individual stakeholders in fine jewellery production. Using the harm chain and institutional theory to frame our investigation, we seek to understand how small businesses within the fine jewellery industry respond to the economic, social and environmental challenges associated with responsible jewellery production, and to investigate how they perceive and negotiate the tensions between responsibility and the resistance derived from the operational norms of secrecy and autonomy within the industry. Our exploratory research provides illustrative examples of how complex harm networks operate within and across the fine jewellery industry, and demonstrates the inter-relationships that exist across the different stages of the fine jewellery harm chain. Findings suggest that institutional forces are coalescing towards a more responsible agenda for the fine jewellery industry. Moreover, while CR is a tool to disrupt harmful institutional norms and practices within such an industry, it requires the co-creation of new transformative business models and multi-stakeholder involvement including firms (SMEs and MNEs), trade associations, non-governmental organisations and consumers. Solutions include national and international legislation, price adjusted certification routes for small firms, harmonisation of industry CR standards to reduce overlap in certification and regulation and gem and precious metal “track and trace” schemes.