Plane Truth: A Qualitative Study of Employee Dishonesty in the Airline Industry

Interviews with flight attendants are analyzed to refine a person-situation model of organizational dishonesty. The refined model suggests that organizational characteristics have direct and indirect (through flight characteristics) effects on likelihood of dishonesty, type of dishonesty, and motivation for dishonesty. The interviews confirm the existence of three motivations for dishonesty in customer service interactions. In addition to the three motivations originally modeled (enrichment, altruism, and revenge), flight attendants demonstrated a fourth: enforce personal moral codes, and a fifth: habituation. The article discusses the implications of the habituation motivation for organizations which encourage benevolent dishonesty, because they accustom employees to saying things they know not to be true.