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This study aims to investigate the influence of two perceived organizational ethics systems (perceived ethics training quality and integrity-based climate) on the ethical decision-making (EDM) of tax accountants in Ghana. The study also examines the moderating role of the decision-makers’ financial situation on the quality ethics training–EDM relationship.

Survey data from 356 tax accountants were analyzed using the partial least squares structural equation modeling technique.

The results show that the two ethics systems influence EDM, but their extent of influence varies across the stages of EDM. Specifically, quality ethics training is a better predictor of EDM at the ethical issue recognition stage, whereas integrity-based climate is a better predictor of EDM at the ethical intention stage. The study also found that decision-makers’ financial situation predicts the ethical recognition stage of EDM but does not moderate the quality ethics training–EDM relationship.

This study recommends the concurrent deployment of quality ethics training and an integrity-based work climate to improve ethical behavior. Policymakers should also emphasize a work climate that promotes honesty, conscientiousness and ethical principles (integrity-based climate) to improve ethical intentions.

This study applied the interactionist theory by capturing the relative effects of two organizational ethics systems and an individual-level situational factor in a single model. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that tests the moderation effect of decision-makers’ financial situation on the ethics training–EDM relationship in a developing country context.

Researchers suggest that trust building may be challenging in the face of conflict. However, there is an emerging proposition that conflict is critical for trust. Using affective events and attribution theories as a framework, the purpose of this paper is to present a model of the mediating effects of positive emotional arousal and self‐conscious emotions in the relationship between conflict and trust.

Data were collected from 325 students enrolled in varied postgraduate programs in a large business school. The authors employed Preacher and Hayes's bootstrapping SPSS macros to test the direct and mediation effects of the connection between conflict, emotions and trust.

Results showed that task, relationship and process conflict were associated with differing aspects of positive emotional arousal (enthusiasm, excitement) and self‐conscious emotions (guilt and shame). Similarly, behavioural guilt was linked with trust while emotions mediated the link between conflict and trust.

The authors acknowledge that there are possible covariates (e.g. how long ago did the conflict occur?) with the variables used in the current study. Future research should include such covariates in the study of the relationship between conflict emotions and trust. Also, the data were largely cross‐sectional, drawn from a relatively small sample. In future, researchers should examine similar constructs with longitudinal data and in large organisational sample. In spite of the above limitations, the validity of the results presented in this paper is not compromised. The study extends self‐conscious emotions literature by demonstrating that guilt and shame have cognitive and behavioural properties and with differing connections with conflict and trust.

The paper's findings suggest that managers who want to engender trust in conflict situations should stimulate task conflict to arouse enthusiasm and excitement. These discrete emotions are critical for building integrity based trust. Alternatively, by managing reparative emotions of guilt effectively, managers may increase levels of perceived trust. Overall, the results suggest that focusing on the effect of conflict on trust without considering the positive emotional arousal and self‐conscious emotions could yield disappointing outcomes.

The study provides new insights into the influence of conflict on trust and the mediating role of emotions (e.g. guilt and shame) in the link between conflict and trust. The paper also offers a practical assistance to individuals interested in building trust, especially in the face of conflict.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the trust repair efforts of top management within an organization specifically focusing on the impact of perceived organizational support and issue‐selling success. Building on the theoretical trust repair literature, the authors bridge the gap between the laboratory dyad trust repair settings and the severe organization‐wide trust repair settings.

The authors focus on one organizational context that experienced competency‐ and integrity‐based trust violations between managers and top management. Surveys and interviews were conducted with 32 managers to capture trust in top management, issue‐selling success rate, and perceived organizational support.

Results demonstrate that perceived organizational support is significantly and positively related to trust in top management. In contrast, issue‐selling success rate is negatively related to trust in top management above and beyond the impact of perceived organizational support.

Trust repair approaches should include demonstrations of organizational support of employees by showing care and concern along with engaging employees in a change process that demonstrates top management commitment to repairing trusting relationships. In addition, top management trust repair efforts should focus on providing managers with the opportunity to engage in multiple issue‐selling episodes.

The paper contributes to an existing research base by extending the approaches to repairing trust in organizational settings to specifically examine the impact of perceived organizational support and issue‐selling.

This study aims to explore the combined strategies leading to successful repair of two types of trust in Chinese construction projects and provide an effective guidance and control trust repair in construction projects. During the research period, the author interviewed 150 managers from 50 Chinese construction projects and collected details of 125 violations. The research examines the effect of combined strategy of trust repair in Chinese management scenario.

This study adopted a mixed, quantitative, qualitative and exploratory approach. The author first extracted six strategies, namely, apology, denial, penance, communication, promise and compensation, from the literature review and generalization. Then, the author conducted an interview with 150 managers from 50 China construction projects. And the author analyzed the data through qualitative comparative analysis (QCA).

When competence-based trust is broken, violators should adopt communication and promise, demonstrate their competence and qualification, and change the attributions of competence from the trustor. When integrity-based trust is broken, violators should apologize, actively admit the mistake, show a positive attitude and seek the forgiveness from the trustor. After reconstructing trustors' perceptions of competence or integrity, violators should also make a promise to trustors for the future. The result of this research not only illustrates the sufficiency and necessity of a single strategy for trust repair but also explores the combination of trust repair strategies that rebuild the trust.

This study is limited to 50 construction projects in the Chinese construction context, so conclusions are limited in application. Data used in this research did not provide an in-depth analysis of trust repair failures. Thus, additional research is needed to explore why trust was not repaired. The study is also limited to examining the Chinese construction project organizations only, and future studies should incorporate organizations in other nations and regions.

Compared with using a single strategy, a combined strategy provides a contribution to the future practice of repair broken relationship between construction project organizations. This research helps to organize decisions and benefits managers, from Chinese owners and contractors, in choosing which of these strategies repair trust. The author also provides a specific combination of strategies to repair relationships for international companies that have conflicts with Chinese construction companies.

This research is among the early studies in China that preliminary examines the combined strategy of trust repair between Chinese owners and contractors by using causal attribution theory and QCA. This study makes a valuable contribution toward combined strategy in construction project and the knowledge system of trust repair. Future studies could build on the findings from the current study to develop a cross-cultural research on trust repair.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of benevolence-based, competence-based and integrity-based trust in peers on the employees’ voluntary knowledge contribution and knowledge seeking with them. In addition, this study aims to explore how engaging in knowledge-contribution and knowledge-seeking behavior with peers influences an individual’s creative performance at work.

A questionnaire-based survey was used and data were collected from 401 professionals working in information technology companies. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses.

Benevolence-based trust and competence-based trust positively influence the extent to which individuals voluntarily engage in knowledge contribution and knowledge seeking with peers. Contrary to expectations, integrity-based trust has a negative effect on knowledge-seeking behavior at workplace. The results also provide evidence for a significant positive relationship between both types of knowledge sharing behavior and employees’ creative performance.

The present study differs from existing studies by offering a theoretical model that integrates different types of knowledge sharing, its antecedents and the differential impact on employee creativity. The model incorporates the knowledge-seeking dimension of individual knowledge sharing behavior, which has received relatively less attention in extant literature, and provides a conceptual comparison of different behavioral contexts in a single study. While prior studies have predominantly explored the antecedents of knowledge sharing, this study is among the few that have simultaneously looked into the outcomes of knowledge sharing at individual level.

Today’s businesses consist of diverse employees, many of whom are in a state of cognitive moral confusion. Some have trouble distinguishing right from wrong. Others question whether such standards even exist. Many businesses need a constant presence that reminds everyone to do the right thing. The name of that ethical conscience is the “ethics office.” Some companies have moved beyond compliance to an integrity‐based approach to ethics management, building a culture that embraces core values and an uncompromising implementation of legal and ethical principles. These guiding principles are embodied in the strategic planning process and evidenced in the daily decision making and actions of the firm. In integrity‐based companies, the ethics office truly serves as the organizational conscience, gently reminding management and employees alike to remember their ethical compass.

New Space activities offer benefits for human progress and life beyond the Earth. However, there is a risk that the New Space Economy may develop according to an anthropocentric mindset favouring human progress and survival at the expense of all other species and the environment. This mindset raises concerns over the social and environmental impacts of space activities and the accountability of space actors. This research article explores the accountability of space actors by presenting a pluralistic accountability framework to understand, inspire and change accountability in the New Space Economy. This study also identifies future research opportunities.

This paper is a reflective and normative essay. The arguments are developed using contemporary multidisciplinary academic literature, publicly available evidence and examples. Further, the authors use Dillard and Vinnari's accountability framework to examine a pluralistic accountability system for space businesses.

The New Space Economy requires public and private entities to embrace hybrid and pluralistic accountability for their social and environmental impacts. A new way of seeing the relationship between human life, the Earth and celestial space is needed. Accounting language is used to mirror and mobilise broader forms of responsibility in those involved in space.

This paper responds to the AAAJ's special issue call for examining how accountability can be ensured in the New Space Age. The space activities businesses conduct, and the anthropocentric view inspiring their race toward space is concerning. Hence, the authors advocate the need for rethinking accountability between humans and nature. The paper contributes to fostering the debate on social and environmental accounting and the accountability of space actors in the New Space Economy. To this end, the authors use a pluralistic accountability framework to help understand how the New Space Economy can face the risks emanating from its anthropocentric mindset.

The public's trust in the authorities has a great impact on people's perception and cognition on development of different types of urban transport infrastructure projects (UTIPs). Given the importance of public acceptance for the efficient construction and operation of UTIPs, this study aims at investigating the personal and environmental factors that influence public acceptance behavior from the perspective of stakeholder management.

Based on social cognitive theory (SCT), this study explores the multiple dimensions of social trust on public acceptance in the development of UTIPs by a comparative case study. Two types of UTIPs, a metro railway and a bridge in the Wuhan City, China, were selected as cases, with a questionnaire distributed among the public to collect their sense of trust towards the development of these projects. The data were analyzed through structural equation modeling (SEM).

This study reveals that social trust positively influences public acceptance, directly or indirectly through perceived benefit and -risks and self-efficacy. However, the emphasis on social trust about competence and integrity of the authorities varies with the types of projects. Self-efficacy worked as the “mirror of trust” reflecting people's attitude towards social trust in the authorities on their ability and morality.

The value of the paper lies in discussing social trust from multiple dimensions in the field of urban infrastructures, which provides new insights into specific mechanisms for shaping public acceptance in project management towards the development of UTIPs.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the contours of police integrity among Chinese police officers. Specifically, this study explores how Chinese police evaluate integrity based on official policy governing interactions, discipline governing infractions, views of seriousness, and willingness to inform when others engage in misconduct.

In total, 353 police officers were surveyed representing those attending in-service training program at a Chinese police university in May 2015. Questionnaires containing 11 scenarios describing police misbehaviors were distributed to officers during classes.

There was a strong correlation between officers’ perceptions of rule-violation, misconduct seriousness, discipline, and willingness to report. Additionally, preliminary results suggest there exists a code of silence among Chinese officers, and that Chinese officers hold a lenient attitude toward the use of excessive force.

This study utilizes a convenient sample, which restricts the generalizability of the results.

The results indicate the existence of code of silence among Chinese officers and their lenient attitude toward the use of excessive force.

Although there has been a growing body of research examining police integrity in both western democracies and transitional societies, China as the largest developing nation in the world and with a unique police system (falls somewhere between the centralized model and the integrated model) is understudied. This study addresses this gap in previous literature by exploring the contours of police integrity among Chinese police officers.

This study examines the trust-repair practices after organizational change.

Previous research on this topic is limited, so an abductive qualitative research approach was adopted. The data were collected from key informants through focus group discussions and interviews.

Beyond previous research findings, this study identified that employee trust can be repaired after benevolence-based trust violations by enforcing ethical behavior and fostering managers' emotional intelligence and after competence-based violations by fostering the sense-making process and by involving third parties in trust recovery. In addition, transparent information sharing and strong management actions predict positive trust outcomes in a change context.

This paper makes three key contributions to the literature on organizational trust by (1) identifying trust violations after organizational change, (2) proposing a process model on trust repair and (3) extending understanding of trust repair practices by revealing new elements.

This study provides practical information from a real work context and can improve managers' understanding of active trust-repair practices.

This paper outlines active trust-repair practices in an organizational change context and expands the current theory by presenting novel insights into organizational trust repair. In addition, this paper contributes to the trust-repair literature by proposing promising avenues for future trust repair research.