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Just as a rotten apple makes other apples around it begin to decay, so too can people influence others within their vicinity, particularly in terms of destructive emotions and behaviors. Trevino and Youngblood (1990) adopted the term ‘bad apples’ to describe individuals who engage in unethical behaviors and who also influence others to behave in a similar manner. In this chapter, the ‘bad apple’ metaphor is adopted to describe the employee whose actions and interactions create and maintain destructive faultlines and unethical exclusion behaviors that negatively impact the emotional well-being and effective and ethical performance of the team. In particular, the chapter examines the way in which ‘bad apples’ use destructive emotion management skills through the manipulation of emotional levers of others, what motivates them to do so and the implications it may have on management.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to use several variables measured at Time 1 to predict cluster membership (bad apples vs good apples) measured at Time 2 and investigate possible differences between business and psychology students in unethical behavior.

Business and psychology students' propensity to engage in unethical behavior (PUB), the love of money, machiavellianism, and risk tolerance at Time 1 and propensity to engage in unethical behavior at Time 2 (four weeks later) were measured. Cluster analysis was used to analyze Time 2 data and bad apples (Cluster 1, high propensity to engage in unethical behavior) and good apples (Cluster 2, low propensity to engage in unethical behavior) were identified. Then all the variables measured at Time 1 were used to predict cluster membership (bad apples vs good apples) measured at Time 2.

In three discriminant analyses, it was found that variables at Time 1 predicted cluster membership at Time 2 for the whole sample and the business sample, but not for the psychology sample. The differences between bad apples and good apples were significant for business students, but not significant for psychology students. Correlation data showed that the love of money was significantly correlated with machiavellianism and risk tolerance.

Students are not assigned randomly to business and psychology courses. Students' behavioral intention, not actual unethical behavior, is measured here. Can professors change people's love of money, machiavellianism, risk tolerance, and the propensity to engage in unethical behavior and enhance students' and future managers' ethical decision making? This issue deserves critical attention in future research.

It is plausible that corruptions and scandals are caused not by lack of intelligence, but by lack of wisdom, or virtue. Professors and researchers may have to focus on ethics training, in general, and the bad apples in bad (business) barrels (mostly male business students), in particular, identify the most critical time and methods in teaching business ethics, enhance learning based on students' own experiences, and promote ethical values in schools, universities, and organizations.

This research shows the importance of incorporating propensity to engage in unethical behavior (PUB), the love of money, machiavellianism, and risk tolerance in identifying bad apples vs good apples across majors.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to broaden the understanding of the three negative member (bad apple) behaviors – withholding of effort, interpersonal deviance and negative affect – put forth by Felps et al. (2006).

An integrative review of extant literature was conducted to understand the impact of the negative member behaviors on other team members. Potential interventions to control this bad apple behavior are identified with supporting evidence from recent empirical studies.

A review of empirical findings in the literature indicate that perceived coworker loafing may lead to counterproductive work behavior toward coworkers and interpersonal deviance may affect the task cohesion of the group. However, the presence of affectively negative individuals is empirically proven to improve the group performance, especially when the group task is related to creativity or information processing (decision-making and idea generation).

Despite the empirical attention paid to “bad apple” behaviors, the implications for managing negative member behaviors are unclear and scattered. In this paper, building on the framework proposed by Felps et al. (2006), the authors focus on three behaviors and provide a concise review of literature and interventions to control or exploit these behaviors.

This paper aims to identify social psychological root causes of misconduct by traders and offers practical guidelines to prevent misconduct.

The authors use insights on social psychological mechanisms to examine current business practices observed in the context of supervisory activities. Case examples were collected at Dutch and European banks, including major institutions. This is an opinion peace that interprets regulator experiences from a social psychological perspective.

The authors characterize standard responses to misconduct in trading as reactive and elucidate why this “bad apples” perspective is insufficiently effective. As an alternative, the authors address the social psychological root causes of misconduct within trading teams. The “corrupting barrels” model identifies ineffective error approaches, outcome inequality and dysfunctional moral climates as contextual root causes in team dynamics. The model uses current insights from empirical research in psychology to do so.

This paper specifies practical guidelines that help prevent future misconduct among traders.

Addressing the contextual root causes of misconduct at the team level will help banks and financial supervisors to improve their effectiveness in preventing misconduct. In the context of standard “bad apples” approaches, the “corrupting barrels” model offers an original perspective.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether official inquiries are an effective method for holding the medical profession to account for failings in the quality and safety of care.

Through a review of the theoretical literature on professions and documentary analysis of key public inquiry documents and reports in the UK National Health Service (NHS) the authors examine how the misconduct of doctors can be understood using the metaphor of professional wrongdoing as a product of bad apples, bad barrels or bad cellars.

The wrongdoing literature tends to present an uncritical assumption of increasing sophistication in analysis, as the focus moves from bad apples (individuals) to bad barrels (organisations) and more latterly to bad cellars (the wider system). This evolution in thinking about wrongdoing is also visible in public inquiries, as analysis and recommendations increasingly tend to emphasise cultural and systematic issues. Yet, while organisational and systemic factors are undoubtedly important, there is a need to keep in sight the role of individuals, for two key reasons. First, there is growing evidence that a small number of doctors may be disproportionately responsible for large numbers of complaints and concerns. Second, there is a risk that the role of individual professionals in drawing attention to wrongdoing is being neglected.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first theoretical and empirical study specifically exploring the role of NHS inquiries in holding the medical profession to account for failings in professional practice.

This paper aims to investigate whether executive compensation and internal control can prevent overseas compliance risks through the mediating influence of multinational corporation (MNC) legitimacy and the moderating role of institutional distance.

Based on a law and economics perspective and the “bad apple,” the “red barrel” and the “bad cellar” theory of business misconduct, this paper constructs a systematic framework of “compliance motivation MNC legitimacy overseas compliance risk prevention” from the individual, organizational and systematic levels and uses data of Chinese MNCs for empirical analysis.

Empirical data from Chinese MNCs show that overseas compliance risks are comprehensively affected by the factors of the individual, organizational and systematic levels. Higher executive compensation and internal control will reduce MNCs’ overseas compliance risks through MNC legitimacy acquisition; institutional distance hinders the positive effect of internal control on MNC legitimacy and therefore aggravates overseas compliance risks.

This paper contributes to the understanding of the overseas law-abiding and offence behavior of MNCs from a law and economics perspective and offers valuable insights on how to prevent the ever-increasing overseas compliance risks.

Although the literature has analyzed the factors of compliance behavior, they are not interrelated, let alone integrated in a systematic risk prevention framework. This paper applies a law and economic analysis framework to the study of the overseas compliance risks for the first time.

The purpose of this paper, which is based on the author’s study, is to explore the potential use of behavioral analysis in predicting corruption among public officials in Indonesia as part of the corruption prevention measures.

This study examines major corruption cases in Indonesia in the past three years through reports from various institutions regarding fraud-related issues to gain a better understanding of corrupt leaders in Indonesia and how to predict their occurrence by means of observing and analyzing visible behavioral red flags.

The author establishes that in addition to the financial perspective, corruption can be detected and thus prevented by means of behavioral observation and analysis. The discussions in this paper suggest that bad leadership is a major cause of corruption in the Indonesian Government. However, a main reason corrupt leaders are elected into office is because the people failed to recognize them in the first place and accidentally voted for them. Among the signs of bad leadership visible enough for the people to see is the so-called “narcissism” which has four core dimensions: authority, self-admiration, superiority and entitlement. The four core dimensions are often visible in leader candidates in Indonesia which should have been early warning signs of bad leadership which may lead into, among others, corruption. Furthermore, the need for excessive compensation, exposure and power has been a common trait in many corruption offenders in Indonesia and each can be associated with the four core dimensions of narcissism. It is because of such a need that pressure/motivation to commit fraud among Indonesian public officials occurred. Society’s awareness of the signs of narcissism will help them decide who will become their future leaders and diminish the risk of corruption in the country.

This study is self-funded. Therefore, due to the limited resources available, the discussions and analysis on visible behavioral red flags of corruption in this study are built upon secondary data from agencies such as the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), the Constitutional Court (MK), the Supreme Audit Board (BPK) and the election Supervisory Committee (Bawaslu). For future studies, primary data from the public regarding their opinions toward the past, present and future leadership in Indonesia will offer a more accurate view into visible behavioral red flags of corruption.

This paper contributes to the development of corruption prevention strategy in Indonesia by empowering the society to monitor potentially corrupt leaders so as to prevent them from controlling the country.

This paper demonstrates how the seemingly small and insignificant behavioral clues may become effective tools to predict and prevent the occurrence of corruption in the future.

This study aims to offer a better understanding of supply side of bribery and corruption in an international business perspective by conceptualizing it in the narrower concept of misconduct in business (MIB) derived from the deontological perspective to business ethics.

The authors use a case study methodology of professionals working within Canadian mining multinational corporations operating in Africa. The authors conducted 2 focus groups, 25 in-depth interviews, document search and an open-ended questionnaire to 15 professionals. Further, they drew on a combination of the classic relationalist sociological framework and its recent revision, that they named the relationalism-substantialism framework to analyze the data.

The triangulated empirical data show that the reason why MIB in the form of bribery supply occurs is not exclusively tied to any given perspective, whether the individual, the organization or the wider societal context. Rather, these different layers are tightly intertwined and interact with each other for the supply of bribery to occur.

Although the three siloed perspectives of MIB have been studied in the literature, they have not been addressed in relation to one another, and even less with a relationalism-substantialism framework. Yet, this perspective contributes compellingly to the understanding of the supply side in bribery. The authors propose a net of conceptually related constructs that intervene in the process of bribery supply occurrence, namely relationality influenced by institutional dysfunctionality and conflation and substantiality through agency and culture.

Videos of police abuse are often spread through technology, raising questions around how perceptions of police are impacted by these images, especially for 18–24-year-olds who are constantly “logged on.” Limited research investigates the impact of social media on attitudes toward police accounting for age and race. The present study utilizes 19 in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of urban college students who regularly use social media in order to understand how they have been impacted by this content. The findings suggest the necessity of using an intersectional framework to understand the impact of tech-witnessed violence. While no gender differences were uncovered, racial differences did surface. White participants described being minimally influenced by videos of police misconduct, rationalizing it as a “few bad apples.” In contrast, participants of color, except those with family members in law enforcement, described being negatively impacted. Viral content contributed to negative opinions of police, emotional distress, and fears of victimization. Ultimately, videos of police brutality do not impact young populations equally. Instead, they are comparatively more harmful to young people of color who spend more time on social media, can envision themselves as the victims, and experience feelings of fear, despair, and anger after watching these videos.

This paper aims to examine the effect of product market competition on firms’ unethical behavior (FUB) in the Chinese insurance industry and to further explore the boundary conditions of the main effects. On the basis of China’s commercial foundation, the study constructs a conceptual framework of FUB by drawing from the perspective of horizontal competition.

Data were collected from 52 property insurance firms at the branch level observed over the six-year period, 2011-2016. Within this framework, market power and market concentration were used to describe product market competition at firm and industry levels, respectively. The moderating effect of market munificence was analyzed to reveal the theoretical boundaries of the main effect. By drawing upon cost–benefit analysis and social network theory, the study used negative binomial model and Poisson model to quantitatively examine the relationship.

The relationship between product market competition and FUB is curvilinear. Especially at the firm level, market power exhibits a U-shape relationship with FUB; at the industry level, market concentration exhibits a U-shape relationship with FUB. In addition, market munificence positively moderates the impact of firm’s market power on FUB, whereas, market munificence negatively moderates the impact of industrial market concentration on FUB.

This paper explored a new type of unethical behavior that concerns consumers or the third party by emphasizing horizontal competitive contexts; it also provides a better understanding of the FUB–financial performance relationship from the perspective of competition. The moderating effects suggest that when the cause of FUB is different (market power vs market concentration), firms may make opposite ethical choice. However, the sample is from a single industry; it will be fruitful to further verify these findings in other industries such as the manufacturing sector. Moreover, the definition of FUB is confined to explicit forms such as participation or collusion but there is no way to measure the implicit forms of FUB.

First, the governance of FUB should not only focus on the firms themselves, but also take into account the industrial market structure. Second, proper use of governance measures for FUB can increase firms’ benefits from “compliance with the law”, enticing firms to decrease FUB. The third, firms with weak market positions, facing fierce competition, should not be involved in FUB for short-term benefit; indeed, a low-cost strategy can be adopted as the dominant competitive strategy. While, in cases of highly concentrated market structure, firms should strive to avoid involvement in FUB through collusion with other rivals.

As it is a very common phenomenon that firms in competitive relationships may adopt FUB toward third parties or consumers, this trend has become a hot topic in the economic and social development in China. The study’s conclusions reveal that a more proactive and ambitious ethical decision is desirable for all kinds of firms; moreover, firms should make a rational choice between “short-term interest” and “long-term survival”. When firms identify the compliance of business ethics as an opportunity to differentiate themselves and perceive the benefits of decreasing FUB as outweighing the costs, the level of FUB will be inhibited, and social welfare will increase.

The primary contribution of this research resides in identifying product market competition as a previously unexplored predictor of FUB, thus revealing the dark side of product market competition. In addition, nonlinear relationships between product market competition and FUB indicate that situations of competition exert an important influence on FUB both at the firm and industry level. This paper’s conclusion provides a more meticulous theoretical explanation for FUB. This research demonstrates that the traditional ethical framework is not sufficient to explain FUB in a horizontal competitive context. Indeed, resource constraints and competitive pressures should also be considered.