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This study examines the effectiveness of instruction in accounting ethics as measured by the impact of that instruction on the incidence of student plagiarism in a college writing assignment.

This study avoids the potential problems inherent in measuring Machiavellianism via a psychological questionnaire by using a “reverse methodology,” whereby Machiavellianism is assessed directly from behavior.

The results support past research suggesting that traditional collegiate ethical education may not affect students’ ethical choices. The findings also suggest that increasing penalties for ethical failures may be an effective means of deterring students and business professionals from engaging in inappropriate activities.

This study supports the use of a behavioral measure of Machivellianism as a means of evaluating the effectiveness of alternative instructional methods in ethics. This behavioral approach is superior to the traditional questionnaire methodology because Machivellianism is judged based on actual behavior rather than having students respond to hypothetical and often stereotyped ethical cases, whereby the student can provide an artificial response that will be viewed favorably by the evaluator.

The findings suggest that higher education needs to recognize the relevance of factors beyond mere ethical education when preparing students for the ethical challenges they will face in the business world.

This paper employs a unique “reverse methodology” to measure Machiavellianism. This reverse methodology has greater external validity in quasi-experimental ethical studies because the results can be extrapolated to real-world scenarios where there is a cost to behaving ethically.

Traditional agency theory assumes monitoring is good for the principal, but we investigate an unintended effect: diminishment of the agent’s preference for honesty. We hypothesize greater dishonest behavior in a monitored environment than in a non-monitored environment, when the agent has the opportunity to cheat outside the scope of monitoring. Relevant theories to explain such behavior are behavioral agency theory, where trust and reciprocity are thought to alter contractual outcomes, and the fraud-triangle theory, where the ability to rationalize deviant acts affects behavior. We utilize participants who have been acclimated to either a monitored or an unmonitored condition in an immediately preceding experiment and seamlessly continue that treatment. Within each of these conditions, participants perform a simple task with a performance-based monetary reward. Half self-report and can safely cheat, while the other half are verified; the difference between verified and self-reported scores is a proxy for dishonest reporting. As hypothesized, unmonitored individuals reciprocate with honest behavior, while monitored individuals tend toward dishonest behavior when the opportunity arises. Implications for fraud prevention are discussed.

The aim of this paper is to explore the behavior pattern, perceptions, and motivations of students towards academic misconduct in a Business School with a view to mitigating its occurrence.

The survey was conducted among a batch of undergraduate students who responded to various dimensions of plagiarism through a structured questionnaire. Responses were measured on a Likert scale. Some non-parametric tests were done for statistical analysis.

From the perception of the prevalence of plagiarism committed by others, the authors found that the majority tend to believe that it happens in spite of the existence of preventive policies. Based on the findings, the authors conclude that the students who are more prone to cheating/plagiarism are male, with low grade point average, and are not on scholarship. Parental disapproval is found to be one of the dominant deterrent factors that have the potential to restrain unethical behavior.

The findings demonstrate that the managers of graduate programs should include parental roles in the deterrent mechanism to improve the quality of education.

Very little evidence exists about the perception of academic dishonesty among the students of a multicultural academic institution located in a middle-east country. There are not many studies that analyze the effectiveness of deterrents from a student’s perspective. In this paper, the authors have attempted to assess the value of various deterrents and their effectiveness as perceived by the students.

Royal Brunei Airlines (the airline) had, in 1986, appointed Borneo Leisure Travel (BLT) as its agent for passenger and cargo transport sales in Sabah and Sarawak. Mr Tan was the founder of BLT, its managing director and its principal shareholder (the only other director and shareholder being his wife) and was, in effect, in sole control of BLT.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the ethical orientations of undergraduate business students in Greece by exploring the relations among students' internalized code of ethics, anomia and students' judgment related to ethical problem situations within classroom as well as business context.

A conceptual framework was developed and a pilot empirical research was conducted based on a questionnaire addressed to a sample of 123 business school undergraduate students. Hypotheses were stated and tested.

The paper finds that internalised code of ethics (ICE) and anomia constructs proved to be reliable and captured the examined students' profile in terms of both their ethical orientations and their world view. Greek future business people's ethical judgement tends to incline towards the ethical side. The ICE appears to influence students' ethical judgment while anomia has no impact. Further, academic dishonesty is positively related to students' attitudes towards unethical managers' behaviors in the business context.

The nature of the research is explanatory, addressed to students of one semester and thus results cannot be generalized on a broader context. Also the construct developed by the authors need to be further tested to increase its validity.

Business schools need to empower students' internalized code of ethics towards the development of more socially responsible future managers and leaders.

The developed construct of the internalized code of ethics and its revealing key role on Greek business students' ethical judgment is considered by the authors as the main contribution of this study.

Employee dishonesty is problematic for businesses in general, particularly for retailers. The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyse selected factors associated with the perceived likelihood of dishonest behaviour among retail employees. Specifically, the role of three negative work outcomes – insufficient pay, boredom, and perceived injustice – is investigated, as well as the effect of individual values and espoused organisational values.

The sample consisted of 784 retail employees from six retail organisations located in Estonia and Latvia. A survey questionnaire that used manipulated scenarios of work outcomes and organisational values was administered.

The study concludes that perceived injustice produces more dishonesty than other negative work outcomes (insufficient pay and boredom), whereas boredom was a surprisingly strong trigger for the perceived likelihood of dishonest behaviour. Individual ethical values determined the perceived likelihood of dishonest behaviour as hypothesised while sensation-seeking values did not. Espoused organisational values had no significant effect on the perceived likelihood of dishonest behaviour.

The results imply that the breach of distributional and procedural justice simultaneously associates most with employee dishonesty, and retail employee selection is the key to curbing dishonest behaviour in the workplace.

The paper makes a contribution to behavioural ethics literature by studying dishonest employee behaviour in the post-communist context while addressing various forms of dishonest behaviour, in addition to stealing. Also, the effect of espoused organisational values has been scarcely studied before.

Academic integrity is the application of honest, ethical and responsible behaviours to all facets of students’ scholarly endeavours and is the moral code of academia. The international literature reports the prevalence of academic dishonesty in higher education across many disciplines (including the health sciences), and there is evidence linking academic dishonesty in health professional students with future unprofessional behaviour in the workplace. International students are reported to be a particularly vulnerable group. This paper aims to investigate the factors that may be predictive of academic honesty and performance in domestic and international occupational therapy students.

In total, 701 participants (603 domestic students; 98 international students) were recruited from five Australian universities, and data were collected via a two-part self-report questionnaire. ANOVA and multi-linear regression analyses with bootstrapping were completed.

Tendency towards cheating and self-perception tendency towards dishonesty in research, gender, age and hours spent in indirect study were found to be statistically significant predictors of academic integrity and performance.

Limitations of this study were the use of convenience sampling and self-report scales which can be prone to social desirability bias. Further studies are recommended to explore other potential predictors of academic honesty and performance in occupational therapy students.

A range of predictors of academic honesty and success were found that will assist educators to target vulnerable domestic and international occupational therapy students as well as address deficiencies in academic integrity through proactive strategies.

This study uses a budgeting experiment to examine the effects of peer influence and firm earnings position on managerial honesty. In the experiment, participants report production costs to request funds from the firm based on their actual private cost information. The firm’s earnings position is manipulated at two levels, a gain condition and an edge condition, and the authors find that participants overstate costs (i.e., are less honest) to a greater extent in the dishonest peer influence condition than in the honest peer influence condition. The authors also find that the effect of peer influence on managerial honesty is context dependent. Specifically, participants respond to both dishonest and honest peer influence in the gain condition but they do not respond to peer influence in the edge condition. This study provides evidence for honest peer influence on honesty and it highlights the role of earnings position on the effect of peer influence on honesty. Controlling the disclosure of certain peer information is not possible because individuals can learn about peer information (honest or dishonest) formally or informally. Such uncontrollable peer information may be harmful to firms. The results suggest firms that provide managers with the consequences of managerial budgeting on the firm operational outcomes can neutralize the effect of peer influence on managerial honesty when managers’ budgeting decisions significantly affect firm profits.

The aim of this study is to analyze the relationship between personality traits and students’ cheating behavior using the five-factor personality model and the fraud triangle factors. This chapter develops an evidential study that has the goal to determine the relationship between the students’ cheating behavior and personality traits by using fraud triangle factors. In this context, 251 surveys have been conducted on students of a foundation university located in Istanbul. As means of data collection, NEO – Five Factor Inventory and Academic Fraud Risk Factors have been used. Data have been analyzed by regression tree analysis. Risk and classification tables have been created before starting the study with a decision tree in which classification and regression trees algorithms were implemented. The results reveal that rationalization behind the cheating is the most important reason for students to copy and people who believed that they were extremely appropriate to copy were responsible ones when analyzed in terms of their personality traits. The results of this study contribute to the literature by discovering the characteristics of those who admit academic dishonesty and underlie the factors or predispositions for engaging in this behavior. For sure, three factors of the fraud triangle may have different levels of significance in this study; in addition, pressure is not associated with the cheating behavior.

Academic dishonesty is a global challenge, with organizational and economic repercussions of the most undesirable kind. Worldwide, efforts are made to establish external and internal factors that contribute to the spread of unethical behavior, so that based on empirical evidence the most useful approaches to mitigating the phenomenon can be found. The present chapter has two major objectives. A first objective is to explore the steps taken by higher education institutions in Romania regarding the construction of an ethical infrastructure, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses. The author will refer to civil society initiatives and universities’ efforts, including legislative efforts. The second objective is to identify a set of lessons from international research that will support the intervention in the direction of building an academic ethical culture in Romania. Given the level of academic fraud demonstrated through research, the process of building university integrity is extremely difficult in Romania. The intervention of the political factors at the university level contributes to a great instability, sabotaging the process of implementing ethical standards. Ethics infrastructures from Romanian universities are incomplete, focusing on two formal components, namely the ethical code and the ethics commissions. There is no coherent chain of ethical decision, ethical management does not actually work. In conclusion, in Romanian universities, ethical principles are not a top priority, as they clash with organizational and governance practices.