Research on behavioral ethics is thriving and intends to offer advice that can be used by practitioners to improve the practice of ethics management. However, three barriers prevent this research from generating genuinely useful advice. It does not sufficiently focus on interventions that can be directly designed by management. The typical research designs used in behavioral ethics research require such a reduction of complexity that the resulting findings are not very useful for practitioners. Worse still, (...) attempts to make behavioral ethics research more useful by formulating simple recommendations are potentially very damaging. In response to these limitations, this article proposes to complement the current behavioral ethics research agenda that takes an ‘explanatory science’ approach with a research agenda that uses a ‘design science’ approach. Proposed by Joan van Aken and building on earlier work by Herbert Simon, this approach aims to develop field-tested ‘design propositions’ that present often complex but useful recommendations for practitioners. Using a ‘CIMO-logic’, these propositions specify how an ‘intervention’ can generate very different ‘outcomes’ through various ‘mechanisms’, depending on the ‘context’. An illustration and a discussion of the contours of this new research agenda for ethics management demonstrate its advantages as well as its feasibility. The article concludes with a reflection on the feasibility of embracing complexity without drowning in a sea of complicated contingencies and without being paralyzed by the awareness that all interventions can have both desirable and undesirable effects. (shrink)

Cognitive biases play an important role in creating and perpetuating problems that lead to foodborne illness outbreaks. By using insights from behavioral ethics, we argue that sometimes people engage in unethical behavior that increases the likelihood of foodborne illness outbreaks without necessarily intending to or being consciously aware of it. We demonstrate these insights in an analysis of the 2011 Listeriosis outbreak in the U.S. from the consumption of contaminated cantaloupes. We then provide policy implications that can improve (...) our understanding of other kinds of disease outbreaks and epidemics. (shrink)

In behavioral ethics today, there is debate as to which theory of moral development is the best for understanding ethical decision making, thereby facilitating ethical behavior. This debate between behavioral ethicists has been profoundly influenced by the field of moral psychology. Unfortunately, in the course of this marriage between moral psychology and business ethics and subsequent internal debate, a simple but critical understanding of human being in the field of management has been obscured; i.e., that morality (...) is not a secondary phenomenon arising out of something else. Therefore, in this paper, we will argue that there is a need in behavioral ethics to shift our understanding away from the influence of contemporary moral psychology and back to management theorist Ghoshal’s :75–91, 2005) view of what it means to be human in which the moral is fundamental. To assist in this labor, we will build on the philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas who sees ethics, regardless of the setting, as a metaphysical concern. What this means is that Levinas sees the essential moral character of human life and the reality of human agency as ontologically fundamental, or constitutive of human nature itself. In other words, the ethical is the “first cause” in regard to understanding the nature and action of the individual, including within organizations. Thus, morality in any sphere of human endeavor, including in business, is not merely epiphenomenal to some more fundamental reality. (shrink)

This book is an accessible, research-based introduction to behavioral ethics. Often ethics education is incomplete because it ignores how and why people make moral decisions. But using exciting new research from fields such as behavioral psychology, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology, the study of behavioral ethics uncovers the common reasons why good people often screw up. Chapters coordinate with free online teaching resources from The University of Texas at Austin. Scientists have long studied the (...) ways human beings make decisions, but only recently have researchers begun to focus specifically on ethical decision making. Unlike philosophy and religion, which aim to tell people how to think and act about various moral issues, behavioral ethics research reveals the factors that influence how people really make moral decisions. Most people get into ethical trouble for doing obviously wrong things. Aristotle cannot help, but learning about behavioral ethics can. By supplementing traditional approaches to teaching ethics with a clear, accessible, detailed, and research-based introduction to behavioral ethics, beginners can quickly become familiar with the important elements of this new field. This book includes the bonus of being coordinated with Ethics Unwrapped-a free, online, educational resource featuring award-winning videos and teaching materials on a variety of behavioral ethics (and general ethics) topics. This book is a useful supplement for virtually every ethics course, and important in any course where incorporating practical ethics in an engaging manner is paramount. The content applies to every discipline-journalism, business ethics, medicine, legal ethics, and others-because its chief subject is the nature of moral decision making. Because the book is research-based yet accessibly written with interesting studies, it could be used in high schools, colleges, graduate schools, and industry. (shrink)

offers an evolutionary approach to morality, in which moral rules form a cultural system that is robust and evolutionarily stable. The folk theorem is the analytical basis for his theory of justice. I argue that this is a mistake, as the equilibria described by the folk theorem lack dynamic stability in games with several players. While the dependence of Binmore's argument on the folk theorem is more tactical than strategic, this choice does have policy implications. I do not believe that (...) moral rules are solutions to the Nash bargaining problem. Rather, I believe that human beings are emotionally constituted, by virtue of their evolutionary history, to embrace prosocial and altruistic notions of in-group–out-group identification and reciprocity. These aspects of human nature are incompatible with Binmore's notion that humans are self-regarding creatures. I present empirical evidence supporting a specific form of human, other-regarding preferences known as strong reciprocity. Key Words: justice • ethics • folk theorem • evolutionary game theory. (shrink)

Law and economics scholarship suggests that, in appropriate cases, the law can improve people’s behavior by changing their preferences. For example, the law can curb discriminatory hiring practices by providing employers with information that might change their discriminatory preference. Supposedly, if employers no longer prefer one class of employees to another, they will simply stop discriminating, with no need for further legal intervention. The current Article aims to add some depth to this familiar analysis by introducing the insights of (...) class='Hi'>behavioral ethics into the law and economics literature on preference change. Behavioral ethics research shows that wrongdoing often originates from semi-deliberative or non-deliberative cognitive processes. These findings suggest that the process of preference change through the use of the law is markedly more complicated and nuanced than previously appreciated. For instance, even if an employer’s explicit discriminatory stance is changed, and the employer no longer consciously prefers one class of employees over another, discriminatory behavior might persist if it originates from semi-conscious, habitual, or non-deliberative decision-making mechanisms. Therefore, actual change in behavior might necessitate a close engagement with people’s level of moral awareness. We discuss the institutional and normative implications of these insights and evaluate their significance for the attempt to improve preferences through the different functions of the legal system. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Scholars studying organizational justice have been slow to incorporate insights from behavioral ethics research, despite the fields’ conceptual affinities. We maintain that this stems from differences in the paradigmatic approaches taken by scholars in each area. First, justice research historically has assumed that individuals are motivated by a desire for instrumental control of worthwhile outcomes or by a concern with social status, while behavioral ethics has paid more attention to the role of internalized moral convictions and (...) duties. Second, organizational justice researchers have investigated one set of individual differences, behavioral researchers have examined another. Third, justice scholars focus on social identities while behavioral ethics scholars also investigate moral identities. As an impetus to future inquiry, our review attends to contemporary organizational justice research that takes into account concepts derived from behavioral ethics. In so doing we hope to highlight an avenue for integrative scholarship that will further our understanding of organizational justice. (shrink)

This is a comparison of graduate students attitudes in Spain and the United States on the issue of universal versus relativist ethics. The findings show agreement on fundamental universal values across cultures but differences in responses to behavioral ethics within the context of entrepreneurial dilemmas.

The development of behavioral ethics has brought forth a detailed understanding of the processes of moral perception, decision-making and behavior within and beyond organizations and communities. However, prescriptive recommendations of behavioral research regarding how to support an ethical environment often underestimate the specifics of organizational characteristics that may encourage the occurrence and persistence of dishonesty, especially regarding deception as a desired action in some instances by some employees and managers. Furthermore, behavioral research does not adequately recognize (...) the notion that dishonesty can be sometimes viewed as an acceptable cost for some expected traits or skills of an employee such as intelligence or creativity. Under some conditions, deception can be even considered a moral, prosocial activity. Finally, formal ethics systems and situational measures to promote honesty may be inefficient or directly harmful. This article highlights questions of how to assess such factors in research on (un)ethical behavior within organizations. (shrink)

Why do honest and decent employees sometimes overstep the mark? What makes managers with integrity go off the rails? What causes well-meaning organizations to deceive their clients, employees and shareholders? Social psychology offers surprising answers to these intriguing and timely questions. Drawing on scientific experiments and examples from business practice, Muel Kaptein discusses why good people sometimes do bad things and how they rise above this behavior. He explains why cheats wear sunglasses, why overstepping the mark could be a good (...) thing, how a surplus of rules creates offenders and why we should be suspicious of colleagues who wash their hands after meetings. (shrink)

Research on ethical norms has grown in recent years, but imprecise language has made it unclear when these norms prescribe “what ought to be” and when they merely describe behaviors or perceptions (“what is”). Studies of ethical norms, moreover, tend not to investigate whether participants were influenced by the prescriptive aspect of the norm; the studies primarily demonstrate, rather, that people will mimic the behaviors or perceptions of others, which provides evidence for the already well-substantiated social proof theory. In this (...) review article, we delineate three streams of norms research in business ethics: behavioral, perceptual, and prescriptive. We argue that by properly categorizing norms, and designing studies to investigate when prescriptions, more than mere mimicry, improve ethical outcomes in organizations, researchers can enhance managers’ efforts to promote ethical outcomes in organizations. (shrink)

The linkage between ethical judgment and ethical behavioral intention was investigated. The Multidimensional Ethics Scale (MES) was used to measure ethical judgment ratings of hypothetical behaviors in retail, sales, and automobile repair scenarios. Confirmatory factor analysis on a sample of 300 undergraduate business students showed that a model with three latent variables representing three correlated ethical dimensions of moral equity, relativism, and contractualism, three correlated scenario latent variables, and correlated residuals presented a good fit to the data. Further, (...) structural models of the relationship of ethical judgment to behavioral intentions revealed that behavioral intentions were more highly related to the scenario factors than to the ethical dimensions across three scenarios. Adding a method factor to the model improved goodness-of-fit and changed some structural model conclusions. (shrink)

To sell a new drug, pharmaceutical companies must discover a compound, run clinical trials to test its efficacy and safety, get it approved by regulatory bodies, produce the drug, and market it. As this process brings the drug through so many hands, there are risks of many kinds of corruption. The pharmaceutical industry has recently gone from being one of the most admired industries to being described by the majority of Americans as “dishonest, unethical, and more concerned with profits than (...) with individual and public health.” Legal scholar Marc Rodwin suggested that the pharmaceutical industry can be viewed through the lens of institutional corruption as defined by legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, whereby widespread or systemic practices undermine the main purposes of drug therapy — healing illness, preventing medical problems, and alleviating suffering. Many drugs do serve these goals, yet a significant number of drugs churned out by pharmaceutical companies are ineffective or have dangerous side effects that could have been predicted had the companies conducted the appropriate research. (shrink)

This study was an exploratory investigation of ethically questionable behaviors among supervisees. Two hundred thirty supervisees and 97 supervisors completed an online survey containing 31 ethically questionable behaviors and 15 possible reasons supervisees engage in ethically questionable behaviors. Ethically questionable behaviors were rated for ethicality, and supervisees reported their relative frequency of personally engaging in the behavior. There was substantial agreement between supervisees and supervisors on the ethicality of the vast majority of ethically questionable behaviors. Reported frequencies among supervisees tended (...) to be low for the behaviors rated to be the most unethical and tended to increase as ethicality ratings increased. A number of possible reasons tended to be endorsed more frequently than others and were correlated with several ethically questionable behaviors. Implications for supervision are discussed. (shrink)

Using Reidenbach and Robin's Multidimensional Ethics Scale, this study investigated the relationships between background variables and students' ethical evaluations, judgments, and behavioral intentions using 3 scenarios involving dilemmas related to academic dishonesty. The sample included 436 master's students and 142 doctoral students. The study found that the participants used a combination of ethical philosophies to make ethical decisions. The respondents judged improper citations more harshly than acts of inappropriate authorship or the falsification of data. The doctoral students generally (...) considered behaviors related to plagiarism and falsification to be more unethical than the master's students did, though no gender differences were found. (shrink)

Behavioral weight loss interventions that promote healthy eating as a way to achieve and maintain healthy weights do not work for most people. Most participants encounter significant challenges to behavior change and do not lose weight or maintain meaningful weight loss. For some, there may be negative consequences of participating in a BWLI, including social, psychological and economic costs. The literature is largely silent on these negative unintended consequences, but they are important for both practical and ethical reasons. If (...) efforts to eat healthier have too many negative consequences for individuals and groups, then these efforts are unlikely to be effective, and promoting them may not always be ethical; this would boost the case for moving away from individual-focused efforts as part of healthy eating efforts. Alternatively, if we can make BWLI interventions more effective and more ethical by mitigating these unintended consequences, then it may be too soon to give up on individual-focused efforts. We make a case for systematic assessment and reporting of the unintended consequences of BWLI. This could contribute to more effective and ethical BWLI and inform obesity interventions and policies more broadly. (shrink)

Randomized trials depend on clinicians feeling that they are morally justified in allowing their patients to be randomized across treatment arms. Typically such justification rides on what has been called “clinical equipoise”—when there is disagreement of opinion among the community of experts about whether one treatment is better than another, then physicians can ethically enter their patients into a clinical trial, even if individual physicians are not at equipoise. Recent debates over prominent studies, however, illustrate that controversy can be easily (...) created rather than dispelled by trials, with many clinicians choosing not to use the proven therapy until they receive more convincing evidence of its superiority. In such situations, we propose that a new standard of equipoise be used to guide decisions about the ethical justifications for research trials—a standard of behavioral equipoise. Under behavioral equipoise, a trial is potentially justifiable if it addresses behavioral resistance to prior scientific evidence. (shrink)

Many consumers implicitly associate sustainability with lower product strength. This so-called ethical = less strong intuition (ELSI) poses a major threat for the success of sustainable products. This article explores this pervasive lay theory and examines whether it is a key barrier for sustainable consumption patterns. Even more importantly, little is known about the underlying mechanisms that might operate differently at the implicit and explicit levels of the consumer’s decision-making. To fill this gap, three studies examine how the implicit judgments (...) that consumers activate automatically shape their consumption behaviors, in concert with their more controlled explicit beliefs about sustainable products. The Main Study investigates the ELSI’s imprint on actual shopping patterns and disentangles the implicit and explicit mechanisms of the lay theory. This paper also asks how this negative influence can be attenuated by examining whether the consumer’s interest in sustainable consumption reduces reliance on the ELSI. Two follow-up studies confirm the robustness from different methodological and practical perspectives. Implications for companies and policy makers are derived. (shrink)

In recent years, 'nudge units' or 'behavioral insights teams' have been created in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other nations. All over the world, public officials are using the behavioral sciences to protect the environment, promote employment and economic growth, reduce poverty, and increase national security. In this book, Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and best-selling co-author of Nudge, breaks new ground with a deep yet highly readable investigation into the ethical issues surrounding (...) nudges, choice architecture, and mandates, addressing such issues as welfare, autonomy, self-government, dignity, manipulation, and the constraints and responsibilities of an ethical state. Complementing the ethical discussion, The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science contains a wealth of new data on people's attitudes towards a broad range of nudges, choice architecture, and mandates. (shrink)

Leo Tolstoy was on to behavioral ethics before there was such as a thing as behavioral ethics. Three scenes from his magnum opus, War and Peace, demonstrate that Tolstoy diagnosed some of the same problems that occupy modern behavioral ethics: confirmation bias, slippery-slope reasoning, and illusions of control. However, whereas modern behavioral ethics has done more to diagnose problems than to prescribe solutions, Tolstoy’s theories of moral psychology and leadership provide direction for (...) human moral self-cultivation. This analysis of War and Peace also suggests that literary fiction can depict worlds at least as fertile as the real world for studying business ethics. Building upon this example, in an age and field which seems too often to prioritize scientific wisdom over that of the humanities, I speculate about how literary fiction can expand our research into more diverse actors and worlds of modern capitalism. (shrink)

Corruption devours profits, people, and the planet. Ethical leaders promote ethical behaviors. We develop a first-stage moderated mediation theoretical model, explore the intricate relationships between ethical leadership and employee ethical behaviors, and treat ethical climate and organizational justice as dual mediators and leaders’ moral attentiveness as a moderator. We investigate leadership from two perspectives—leaders’ self-evaluation of moral attentiveness and members’ perceptions of ethical leadership. We theorize: These dual mediation mechanisms are more robust for high moral leaders than low moral leaders. (...) Our three-wave data collected from multiple sources, 236 members and 98 immediate supervisors in the Republic of Iraq, support our theory. Specifically, ethical leadership robustly impacts organizational justice’s intensity and magnitude, leading to high employee ethical behaviors when leaders’ moral attentiveness is high than low. However, ethical leadership only influences the ethical climate’s intensity but has no impact on the magnitude when leaders’ moral attentiveness is high than low. Therefore, organizational justice is a more robust mediator than the ethical climate in the omnibus context of leader moral attentiveness. Our findings support Western theory and constructs, demonstrating a new theory for Muslims in Arabic’s emerging markets. Individual decision-makers apply their values as a lens to frame their concerns in the immediate and omnibus contexts to maximize their expected utility and ultimate serenity-happiness. Ethical leadership trickles down to employee ethical behaviors, providing practical implications for improving the ethical environment, corporate social responsibility, leader-member exchange, business ethics, and economic potentials in the global competitive markets. (shrink)

In “A Virtue Ethics Critique of Ethical Dimensions of Behavioral Economics,” Professor Daryl Koehn criticizes the field of behavioral economics. She argues that behavioral economists ignore many important factors that affect how people make decisions, that their results are derived from experiments where subjects make choices in overly restrictive, artificial, and thin contexts that do not capture the richness of reality, and that the approach brings up psychological motivations that affect behavior in a piecemeal, ad hoc (...) way that does not capture the overall tapestry of the factors that influence the choices that we make. In this comment, I offer responses to many of these criticisms, and note where I think we have common ground. (shrink)

The articles by Brooks-Gum, Fisher, Hoagwood, Liss, and Scott-Jones (all this issue) present a panoply of real-world ethical issues in conducting scientific research on risky behaviors of children, adolescents, and their parents, particularly those from vulnerable populations. The universal, ethical principles of beneficence, justice, and respect for others are always applicable, but they do not resolve issues of child assent, parental consent, legal reporting requirements for illegal behaviors, and the special problems of studying risky behaviors in risky populations. Taken as (...) a group, the articles raise some of the most interesting ethical problems that arise in developmental research. My discussion elaborates some issues and fails to resolve others. I hold the view that both science and ethics can be served by thoughtfully designed and implemented research on important social issues, but that the studies themselves cannot simultaneously solve the many societal problems of participants and be scientifically credible. (shrink)

Psychologists recognize the need to know and adhere to the ethics code in the country or countries in which they work. However, most countries do not have ethics codes that govern the work of psychologists. Thus, psychologists working in countries that do not have an ethics code face a dilemma: They need to behave ethically yet do not know the guidelines or standards that govern these behaviors. This article highlights some cross-national conditions about which psychologists should be (...) aware when working cross-nationally, especially in countries that may lack an ethics code. These include knowledge of the host country's prevailing moral values, its laws and administrative policies, and ethics codes as well as policies approved by international agencies and associations. Eight guidelines are provided for psychologists working in host countries that lack ethics codes. (shrink)

In this article, the important but neglected link between workplace safety-enhancing behavior and ethics is explored. Using data from 237 employees from five manufacturing plants in the Midwest, we investigated how specific local ethical climate types are linked to incidences of injuries and two types of safety-enhancing behaviors: safety compliance and safety participation. It was hypothesized that egoist climates are positively related to injuries and negatively related to safety-enhancing behaviors. In contrast, it is proposed that both benevolent and principled (...) climates have negative relationships with injuries and positive relationships with safety-enhancing behaviors. Results provided support only for our principled climate types while benevolence has the desired negative relationship with injuries. Egoism and benevolence are not related to safety-enhancing behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications of findings are discussed. (shrink)

Opioid use disorder can encompass a number of behavioral, psychological, physiological, and interpersonal symptoms which collectively impair one’s functioning to different degrees. Of all the personal and societal problems associated with OUD, the most destructive and absolute is death. Given the caustic effects of OUD on quality of life and mortality, evidence-based pharmacotherapy and psychosocial interventions are necessary. It is the collective potential for buprenorphine to increase safety and concurrent cognitive-behavioral group therapy to address substance use triggers as (...) well as comorbid psychiatric conditions, which makes this combination particularly promising for RCT of effectiveness. The purposes of this article are to identify specific ethical issues which may hinder community partners from collaborating with clinical trialist wishing to conduct CBGT buprenorphine efficacy-effectiveness trials at their agency and provide some basic guidelines and methods for addressing these community partner ethical concerns. The purpose of the manuscript is to facilitate university and substance use/mental health center community collaborations that will result in ethical clinical trial methodology and findings that meaningfully translate to efficacious, effective, and generalizable CBGT and buprenorphine hybrid interventions for OUD. (shrink)

This study explores the ethical attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions of a sampling of political science students in Taiwan. It investigates their intentions toward observing ethics in the area of digital rights, on topics such as the freedom of expression, freedom of association, equal access to information, confidentiality, security, and protection of intellectual property while using computers. Based on preliminary studies, a questionnaire was designed and distributed to 660 political science and public administration students throughout colleges in Taiwan. Data collected (...) from 440 valid samples have been analyzed using structural equation modeling to test the three sets of hypotheses made by the researchers in the framework of the theory of planned behavior. Findings show attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavior control of the respondents all have positive impacts on the personal observation of information ethics. In this regard, altruism, the secondary group, and the sense of security have greater influence than egoism, the primary group, and the consideration of self-efficacy. Implications of these findings and recommendations for cultivating computer ethics in Taiwan and elsewhere are discussed. (shrink)

This study examines the theory of planned behavior and the multidimensional ethics scale. Variables from both are included to determine which ones significantly correlate with student ethical behavioral intention in an academic setting. Using a survey, responses are collected from undergraduate business students from two southwestern universities in the United States using a scenario-based approach, looking at individual situations and group situations. SmartPLS was used to assess the results for four scenarios. From the theory of planned behavior, attitude (...) was a significant predictor of behavioral intention across all four scenarios while subjective norm was significant in one scenario. From the multidimensional ethics scale, moral equity and relativism were significant in one group scenario while moral equity and utilitarianism were each significant in an individual scenario. The findings indicate support for the use of the TPB and the MES when exploring ethics in an academic setting and for the need to study both individual and group situations. A discussion of the findings and implications is given. (shrink)

Background:Africa is increasingly becoming an important region for health research, mainly due to its heavy burden of disease, socioeconomic challenges, and inadequate health facilities. Regulatory...

An original examination of the relevance of behavioral economics for the practice of medical ethics.

The ethics of citation has attracted increased attention in recent discussions of research and publication ethics, fraud and plagiarism. Little attempt has been made, however, to situate specific citation misbehaviors in terms of broader ethical practices and principles. To investigate researchers’ perceptions of citation norms, we surveyed active US researchers receiving federal funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Participants (n = 257) were asked (...) about citation norms they endorse (norm reports), the behaviors they perceive others to engage in (peer reports), and their own citation behaviors (self-reports). Our analyses showed that while considerable discrepancies exist between norm reports, peer reports and self-reports, respondents’ discipline has no significant effect on these. Participants indicated that their own practices and that of their peers falls short of the norms they endorse, but that their own behavior is much less ethically deficient than that of their peers. An exploratory factor analysis revealed that ethically questionable citation behaviors could be grouped usefully into three categories: strategic citations, neglectful citations, and blind citations. Contrary to our hypothesis, the survey showed that greater experience does not always result in better citation practices. A particularly divisive issue pertained to intentionally citing authors from underrepresented demographic groups for reasons of social justice, but broad support for this practice is lacking, although arts and humanities scholars are slightly more supportive. Most researchers view questionable citation practices as negatively affecting their disciplines. Our findings suggest the need for clearer articulations of the citation norms and improved guidance and training about citations. (shrink)

A model is developed which identifies and describes various factors which affect ethical and unethical behavior in organizations, including a decision-maker's social, government and legal, work, professional and personal environments. The effect of individual decision maker attributes on the decision process is also discussed. The model links these influences with ethical and unethical behavior via the mediating structure of the individual's decision-making process.

This paper studies the relationship between organizational ethical climate and the forms of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), including in-role and extra-role behaviors, and examines the mediating effect of employee loyalty. A sample of employees from a traditional Hong Kong-based company was used as a study group. The purpose of this study was to examine the causes and implications of how various ethical work climates affect employee performance. Based on a model proposed by Victor and Cullen, ethical climate is arranged from (...) lower levels to higher levels. The results suggest that lower levels of ethical climate (instrumentality and independence), characterizing a weak relational contract between employee and employer, are associated with negative extra-role behavior. In contrast, higher levels of ethical climate (caring and law-and-code), symbolic of a strong relational contract at work, are associated with positive extra-role behavior. Moreover, normative commitment mediated a positive relationship between caring and identification with the company, whereas attitudinal loyalty mediated the negative relationship between independence and altruism. Implications for future research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

We draw on the behavioral agency model to explore the ethical consequences of CEO equity incentives. We argue that CEOs are more concerned with funding pension plans when they have more to gain from their stock options yet will increasingly underfund employee pension funds as their current option wealth increases. Our findings reveal that both effects hold when the CEO has greater power (also occupying board chair) over firm decision making. Our study suggests that there is an ethical dimension (...) to equity incentives, given they are intended to align CEO interests with shareholders, yet potentially incentivize CEO behaviors with adverse consequences for employees. Insights from our findings provide boards and regulators with behavioral levers to protect employee well-being in the context of pension funding. (shrink)

Behavioral economics is the latest trendy form of economics. Increasingly theorists are advocating using behavioral economics to do normative ethics or claiming that the behavioralists’ findings render normative claims otiose. I argue in this paper that we should be extremely wary when it comes to accepting any such normative pronouncements. I argue that behavioral economics: (a) minimizes and/or misunderstands the role that character and architectonic life goals play in accounting for the why of ethical behavior, (b) (...) fundamentally misconceives human practical rationality, (c) often unduly narrows the range of human action and choice, (d) misleadingly assumes that options are merely given to us rather than generated by us in accordance with our character, (e) is parasitic upon normative ethics, (f) results in an unhelpful ad hoc approach to ethical thinking, which is unlikely to prove all that useful and may even dangerously mislead ordinary agents or those who operate corporate compliance programs and who seek to improve corporate cultures, and (g) ignores the key role played in ethical behavior by meso‐ and macro‐factors. (shrink)

Abstract:This field survey focused on two constructs that have been developed to represent the ethical context in organizations: ethical climate and ethical culture. We first examined issues of convergence and divergence between these constructs through factor analysis and correlational analysis. Results suggested that the two constructs are measuring somewhat different, but strongly related dimensions of the ethical context. We then investigated the relationships between the emergent ethical context factors and an ethics-related attitude (organizational commitment) and behavior (observed unethical conduct) (...) for respondents who work in organizations with and without ethics codes. Regression results indicated that an ethical culture-based dimension was more strongly associated with observed unethical conduct in code organizations while climate-based dimensions were more strongly associated with observed unethical conduct in non-code organizations. Ethical culture and ethical climate-based factors influenced organizational commitment similarly in both types of organizations. Normative implications of the study are discussed, as are implications for future theorizing, research and management practice. (shrink)

The pressure of oversight and scrutiny in the business-to-business purchasing process has the potential to cause psychological distress in purchasing professionals, giving rise to apprehensions about being ethically inappropriate. Utilizing depth interviews with public sector purchasing professionals in a phenomenological approach, the authors develop the notion of ethical purchasing dissonance to explain the psychological distress. An inductively derived conceptual framework is presented for ethical purchasing dissonance that explores its potential antecedents and consequences; illustrative propositions are presented, and managerial implications are (...) discussed. (shrink)

This textbook examines the extent to which moral values play a role as productive forces for the economy, and explores the effect of ethical and unethical Behavior on the economy. It shows how ethics improves productivity in the economy, and provides specific ethics tools for practical application for students and managers. Stemming from an overall interdisciplinary approach, and combining recent research results from sciences such as economics, business administration, Behavioral economics, philosophy, psychology and sociology, this textbook fills (...) a gap in the literature on ethics in business. The book begins with the foundations of business ethics by defining business ethics, delineating its objectives, and discussing the importance of business ethics for business, the economy and society. Next, it presents the ethical evaluation approaches to enable the reader to evaluate economic Behavior ethically. It then explores ‘man in business’, and deals with such issues as Behavior, motivation, ethical orientation, and the presence or absence of a sense of justice. Following this is a discussion of the rules of the market and of questions such as: Does the market economy promote ethical Behavior or is there a conflict of goals between ethics and market economy? Do companies have a social responsibility? The book concludes with an analysis of the importance of ethics for productivity in the enterprise and in the economy, and presents ethics tools as the instruments with which management can promote ethical Behavior of their employees. Following a textbook structure, the book first derives knowledge from scientific studies that is relevant for students, and then summarizes the results. It explains ethical assessment approaches, and then gives an ethical assessment of economic Behavior using case studies. It uses roleplaying and games to explain the Behavior of people in relation to ethics. (shrink)

Despite the increasing inclusion of ethics and compliance issues in corporate training, the business world remains rife with breaches of responsible management conduct. This situation indicates a knowledge–practice gap among professionals, i.e., a discrepancy between their knowledge of responsible management principles and their behavior in day-to-day business life. With this in mind, this paper addresses the formative, developmental question of how companies’ ethics and compliance training programs should be organized in a manner that enhances their potential to be (...) effective. Drawing on both the qualitative analysis of existing ethics and compliance training and the conceptual literature on behavioral ethics, a framework is proposed that consecutively aligns various types of training into a comprehensive ethics and compliance training program. The strengths and limitations of the suggested framework are discussed. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, EarlyView.

Followers’ perceptions of their leaders’ ethics have the potential to impact the way they react to the influence of these leaders. The present study of 365 U.S. Air Force Academy Cadets examined how followers’ perceptions of their leaders’ ethics moderated the relationships found between the leaders’ use of power, as conceptualized by French and Raven, and the followers’ contextual performance. Our results indicated that leaders’ use of expert, referent, and reward power was associated with higher levels of organizational (...) citizenship behaviors among their followers when the followers perceived these leaders to be more ethical. Moreover, when followers perceived their leaders to be less ethical, these followers reported lower levels of OCBs when their leaders’ utilized referent power. Practical implications, limitations, and future research are also discussed. (shrink)

The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) is urging academic medical centers to ban pharmaceutical detailing. This policy followed from a consideration of behavioral and neuroeconomics research. I argue that this research did not warrant the conclusions drawn from it. Pharmaceutical detailing carries risks of cognitive error for physicians, as do other forms of information exchange. Physicians may overcome such risks; those determined to do so may ethically engage in pharmaceutical detailing. Whether or not they should do so is (...) a prudential judgment about which reasonable people may disagree. The AAMC's ethical condemnation of detailing is unwarranted and will subvert efforts to maintain a realm of physician discretion in clinical work that is increasingly threatened in our present practice environment. (shrink)

"This book presents a collection of chapters that contribute significantly to the field of business ethics by promoting much needed insights into the motives that drive people to act ethically or unethically. It acknowledges that business ethics plays a pivotal role in the way business is conducted and adds insights derived from a behavioral view that will make us more aware of morality and provide recommendations into how we can improve our actions"--Provided by publisher.

In this consensus report by a diverse group of academics who conduct and/or are concerned about social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research, the authors recount the often‐ugly history of scientific attempts to understand the genetic contributions to human behaviors and social outcomes. They then describe what the current science—including genomewide association studies and polygenic indexes—can and cannot tell us, as well as its risks and potential benefits. They conclude with a discussion of responsible behavior in the context of SBG (...) research. SBG research that compares individuals within a group according to a “sensitive” phenotype requires extra attention to responsible conduct and to responsible communication about the research and its findings. SBG research (1) on sensitive phenotypes that (2) compares two or more groups defined by (a) race, (b) ethnicity, or (c) genetic ancestry (where genetic ancestry could easily be misunderstood as race or ethnicity) requires a compelling justification to be conducted, funded, or published. All authors agree that this justification at least requires a convincing argument that a study's design could yield scientifically valid results; some authors would additionally require the study to have a socially favorable risk‐benefit profile. (shrink)