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The purpose of this paper is to examine human resources (HR) professionals’ self-perceptions of ethically questionable human resource management (HRM) practices (i.e. disregard for the individual, favoring those in power and discrimination). The research sought specifically to determine how these perceptions are influenced by their organizations’ ethical infrastructure and corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices.

Data were collected from 134 HR professionals using an anonymous structured questionnaire.

The scope of organizations’ ethics programs and the degree of importance given to developing an ethical infrastructure were found to predict the level of acceptance of unethical HRM practices related to discrimination. These practices are also less acceptable to professionals from organizations that are perceived as more socially responsible regarding their employees.

Additional studies with larger samples are needed to determine more clearly not only the influence of contextual determinants, but also the practical consequences of high levels of acceptance of unethical practices in HRM.

Organizations can decrease their HR professionals’ acceptance of ethically questionable HRM practices by developing and emphasizing a strong ethical infrastructure and CSR practices, especially those affecting employees.

HR professionals’ perceptions of ethical issues have rarely been analyzed using empirically tested methods. By surveying HR professionals, this study contributes to a fuller understanding of their perceptions regarding the ethics of their own practices. The results show that contextual determinants play an important role in predicting the level of acceptance of unethical HRM practices, especially those leading to discrimination.

This research focuses on the distinct group of high-status employees commonly referred to as workplace vigilantes, and conceptually investigates how unethical requests by these individuals impact the behavior and attitude of other employees over time using the social identity theory.

For developing a conceptual model, literature from the domains of social identity, organizational behavior and general management was searched through Google Scholar. To search the literature, some key terms such as “unethical activities”, “Islamic work ethics” and “social identity” were searched and analyzed.

Using the social identity theory, a conceptual process model is developed which suggests that when high-status employees propose unethical requests to employees, individuals with high morality are likely to refuse those unethical requests to protect their self-categorizations. However, taking the unfair advantage of their illegitimate powers, high-status employees are likely to eventually make wrong judgments and give unnecessary punishments to moral employees. It is further argued that consistent victimization is likely to negatively impact the social identity of such employees and leads to irritability in moral employees, particularly when such individuals are unable to get the requisite social support from their leaders.

While a considerable body of literature has focused on the antecedents and consequences of intense unethical business practices and the crucial role of leaders in such activities, limited attention has been given to the role of other employees and how they engage in mild unethical misconduct regularly, which is the key focus of this research. The novel conceptual framework needs to be tested in diverse contexts for further development and validation.

Advances in Big Data, artificial Intelligence and data-driven innovation bring enormous benefits for the overall society and for different sectors. By contrast, their misuse can lead to data workflows bypassing the intent of privacy and data protection law, as well as of ethical mandates. It may be referred to as the ‘creep factor’ of Big Data, and needs to be tackled right away, especially considering that we are moving towards the ‘datafication’ of society, where devices to capture, collect, store and process data are becoming ever-cheaper and faster, whilst the computational power is continuously increasing. If using Big Data in truly anonymisable ways, within an ethically sound and societally focussed framework, is capable of acting as an enabler of sustainable development, using Big Data outside such a framework poses a number of threats, potential hurdles and multiple ethical challenges. Some examples are the impact on privacy caused by new surveillance tools and data gathering techniques, including also group privacy, high-tech profiling, automated decision making and discriminatory practices. In our society, everything can be given a score and critical life changing opportunities are increasingly determined by such scoring systems, often obtained through secret predictive algorithms applied to data to determine who has value. It is therefore essential to guarantee the fairness and accurateness of such scoring systems and that the decisions relying upon them are realised in a legal and ethical manner, avoiding the risk of stigmatisation capable of affecting individuals’ opportunities. Likewise, it is necessary to prevent the so-called ‘social cooling’. This represents the long-term negative side effects of the data-driven innovation, in particular of such scoring systems and of the reputation economy. It is reflected in terms, for instance, of self-censorship, risk-aversion and lack of exercise of free speech generated by increasingly intrusive Big Data practices lacking an ethical foundation. Another key ethics dimension pertains to human-data interaction in Internet of Things (IoT) environments, which is increasing the volume of data collected, the speed of the process and the variety of data sources. It is urgent to further investigate aspects like the ‘ownership’ of data and other hurdles, especially considering that the regulatory landscape is developing at a much slower pace than IoT and the evolution of Big Data technologies. These are only some examples of the issues and consequences that Big Data raise, which require adequate measures in response to the ‘data trust deficit’, moving not towards the prohibition of the collection of data but rather towards the identification and prohibition of their misuse and unfair behaviours and treatments, once government and companies have such data. At the same time, the debate should further investigate ‘data altruism’, deepening how the increasing amounts of data in our society can be concretely used for public good and the best implementation modalities.

In the scope of the immense growth of corporate frauds and scandals, reporting unethical practices could be considered as an important mechanism to control them and ultimately improve organizational quality. To this end, this study proposes the conceptual framework comprising the enablers impacting employees' tendencies and behaviors to reporting misdemeanor in the workplace.

Systematic review of literature has been carried out. To understand the complexities among various enablers and to analyze their driving power and contingencies, a modified total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) approach has been adopted.

The findings indicate that enablers such as moral identity (MI) and job satisfaction (JS) having higher driving power (come at the bottom of the hierarchy) are relatively more important. Furthermore, perceived personal cost (PC), moral courage (MC), self-efficacy (SE) and anger have high dependent power of factors. Finally, the paper provides two paths that can lead to whistleblower's ethical decision.

A conceptual framework delivered in this paper requires to test against the field data. However, the conceptual understanding of driving enablers paves the way to top management in recruiting and hiring people in the workplace.

This study represents the first attempt to apply TISM for whistleblowing phenomenon. It provides a comprehensive conceptual framework in order to address the relative importance of various individual enablers in developing reporting tendencies against misdemeanors.

Drawing on the job demands-resources theory, this study investigates the mediating role of job satisfaction and the moderating roles of abusive supervision and perceived organisational support (POS) in the relationship between perception of organisational politics (POP) and employee job performance. This study hypothesised that employees with high POS and low abusive supervision can function effectively even in organisations with a high level of organisational politics.

The study was conducted anonymously on 408 employees, from companies operating in Poland which were completed using the computer-assisted telephone interview method. Statistical verifications of the moderation and mediation analyses were conducted with PROCESS macro.

The results showed that a high level of POP does not diminish employee performance when employees perceive low levels of abusive supervision and a high level of POS. Furthermore, the results revealed that job satisfaction mediates between POP and employee performance.

This study integrated research on politics, abusive supervision and POS to examine the collective impact of these variables on employee performance. The findings have important implications in terms of the potential buffering that can be applied to reduce the negative impacts resulting from POP.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss relationships between high-performance work systems (HPWSs) and productive/counterproductive behaviours initiated and performed by employees. Using the ability, motivation and opportunities (AMO) theoretical framework, the authors described how an HPWS influences employee behaviours. The authors suggest that HPWSs could increase productive work behaviour and decrease counterproductive behaviours by mediating employees' affective commitment and moderating their self-efficacy.

This study is based on data from 563 questionnaires, which were completed using the computer-assisted telephone interview method. The respondents were knowledge workers, representing companies of various sizes in the Knowledge-Intensive Business Service (KIBS) sector in Poland. Statistical verification of the mediation and moderation analyses was conducted with macro PROCESS (ver. 3.3).

This research confirmed a significant statistical relationship between all examined variables. It has been shown that HPWSs influence productive and counterproductive behaviours both directly and indirectly through mediation of affective commitment. The statistical analysis also confirmed the study’s hypothesis that self-efficacy moderates relationships between an HPWS and employee behaviours.

This study has two limitations: its cross-sectional design and the use of self-reported questionnaire data.

This study is the first to explore mediating mechanisms between HPWSs and employee performance in the context of the KIBS companies in Poland. The results indicate that HPWSs are important antecedents of productive and counterproductive behaviours among knowledge workers.

This paper aims to better understand how accountability for sustainability takes shape within organisations and specifically, what makes employees act in a Swedish local authority. This aim moves beyond the prevalent external face of accountability in social and environmental accounting research by observing how employees understand and act upon their multiple accountability demands.

This paper adopts a single case study approach within a Swedish local authority, drawing from qualitative data including semi-structured interviews, site visits and governing documents.

Sustainable action is not only the product of hierarchically enforced structural accountabilities and procedures but often must be reconciled with the personal perspectives of the public sector employees involved as part of an accountability dynamic. Additionally, the findings reveal that hierarchical accountability, rather than serving to individualise and isolate employees, acts as a prompt for the more practical and personal reconciliations of accountability with the ethics and experiences of the individual involved.

Greater consideration to employee socialisation processes in public sector organisations should be given to reinforce organisational governance systems and controls, and thus help ensure sustainable behaviour in practice.

Employee socialisation processes are important for the development of sustainable practices both within and beyond organisational boundaries.

This study considers the interrelatedness of hierarchical and socialising accountability measures and contributes towards the understanding of the relationship between these two accountability forms, contrary to previous understandings that emphasise their contrasting nature and incompatibility.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how hospitality companies can best explain controversial corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities to consumers who may not agree with the CSR activity. This research explores message framing through emotional and cognitive appeals to influence consumer perceptions of the Gideon Bible in USA hotel rooms. The study uses the theory of deontic justice to measure the impacts of messaging on consumer perceptions of the morality of the Gideon Bible as suicide prevention in hotels and its relation to controversial CSR initiatives.

The study uses an experimental study design via a self-administered survey to analyze participants’ perceptions of the placement of the Gideon Bible in hotel rooms and participants’ attitudes toward CSR initiatives based on deontic justice and religion using different message framing conditions.

Results show that religion was a major determinant of attitude towards the Gideon Bible, but the sentiment analysis also revealed that negative perceptions can be mitigated through message framing via emotional and cognitive appeals. Additionally, the cognitive appeal did impact CSR perceptions, as did identifying as Christian. Moral outrage emerged as a significant moderator for the relationships between message framing, attitudes toward the Gideon Bible and CSR.

This study provides an extension of deontic justice research to examine justice traits in accepting controversial CSR.

This conceptual/study protocol paper provides important context around the role of sport in Australia where sport provides aspects of community agency through participation, organisation and volunteerism. It provides a descriptive analysis of how sport assists young people in developing physical and mental ”fitness” through its community orientation. However, it also provides discussion around the potential of a “generation lost” to sport as a consequence of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The conceptual nature of this paper means that the data collection underpinning this research has not yet been conducted. However, given that we have applied for human research ethics along with having accrued sporting clubs and organisations eager to be involved in the research, we are planning to roll out this research by mid 2020. The design will be based on mixed methods approach whereby large-scale surveys together with focus groups and interviews will be central to the research data collection process. This research is unique given the nature of the time in which it exists. The last global pandemic was around 100 years ago when sport did not play such a significant role in society. Understanding the implications of the pandemic on young people and to the sporting clubs and organisations will be key in re-establishing sport as a central component of community agency towards the physical and mental health of young people. The urgency of understanding this is key to assisting the loss of potential young people to sport and the benefits that go with it to the individual, the community, and society as a whole.

Looking at the limits of artificial intelligence (AI) and controlling based on complexity and system-theoretical deliberations, the authors aimed to derive a future outlook of the possible applications and provide insights into a future complementary of human–machine information processing. Derived from these examples, the authors propose a research agenda in five areas to further the field.

This article is conceptual in its nature, yet a theoretically informed semi-systematic literature review from various disciplines together with empirically validated future research questions provides the background of the overall narration.

AI is found to be severely limited in its application to controlling and is discussed from the perspectives of complexity and cybernetics. A total of three such limits, namely the Bremermann limit, the problems with a partial detectability and controllability of complex systems and the inherent biases in the complementarity of human and machine information processing, are presented as salient and representative examples. The authors then go on and carefully illustrate how a human–machine collaboration could look like depending on the specifics of the task and the environment. With this, the authors propose different angles on future research that could revolutionise the application of AI in accounting leadership.

Future research on the value promises of AI in controlling needs to take into account physical and computational effects and may embrace a complexity lens.

AI may have severe limits in its application for accounting and controlling because of the vast amount of information in complex systems.

The research agenda consists of five areas that are derived from the previous discussion. These areas are as follows: organisational transformation, human–machine collaboration, regulation, technological innovation and ethical considerations. For each of these areas, the research questions, potential theoretical underpinnings as well as methodological considerations are provided.