Search results

Business ethics provide a potent source of competitive advantage, placing increasing pressure on organizations to create and maintain an ethical workforce. Nonetheless, ethical breaches continue to permeate corporate life, suggesting that there is something missing from how we conceptualize and institutionalize organizational ethics. The current effort seeks to fill this void in two ways. First, we introduce an extended ethical framework premised on sensemaking in organizations. Within this framework, we suggest that multiple individual, organizational, and societal factors may differentially influence the ethical sensemaking process. Second, we contend that human resource management plays a central role in sustaining workplace ethics and explore the strategies through which human resource personnel can work to foster an ethical culture and spearhead ethics initiatives. Future research directions applicable to scholars in both the ethics and human resources domains are provided.

The beginning of the twenty-first century was plagued with extensive, evasive, and disheartening U.S. business and political leadership failures. Despite the accounting profession’s standards of professional ethics, accounting as a profession also was tainted with various ethical leadership indiscretions during this time. In response to these ethical leadership failings, renewed interest in developing accounting professionals with strong ethical principles and ethical leadership behaviors emerged. In many firms, training and development in ethical behavior is now at the forefront of communications and professional development efforts. The question remains, however, can the profession instill in its members the importance of ethical conduct? Can ethical leaders be developed who model ethical behavior? In response to the call for leaders who are ethical and moral, this research examined a model of ethical leadership and its impact on leader effectiveness for leaders within the accounting profession. The analysis shows that ethical and transformational leadership behaviors make independent and significant contributions to explaining leader effectiveness.

In this final chapter, we explore the ever-evolving 21st century landscape where ethics drive community development toward resilience and progress. Drawing inspiration from the subheadings mapping our journey, we traverse international case studies spanning Canada, Brazil, Sweden, Kenya, China, Australia, Antarctica, and India. Through these global insights, we uncover the impacts of dynamic forces on communities worldwide, navigating ethical dilemmas and opportunities. We present strategies tailored to diverse continent-specific needs, explore inclusive governance models, and highlight the transformative power of ethical engagement. This journey underscores the vital role of resilience and concludes with a global call to embrace ethical approaches for inclusive community development and a sustainable future.

This research presents a comprehensive explanation of unethical pro-organisational behaviour (UPB), an emerging phenomenon in organisational behaviour and especially in moral behaviour research. The authors tested the fit of Culture-Identification-Ideology-UPB moral behaviour model. The results indicate that individuals having strong organisational identification and high relativism ethical ideology may indulge in the practice of UPB. Interestingly, our study also reveals that strong ethical organisational culture may not restrain, rather may facilitate UPB. The authors concluded with suggestions for the practitioners and future scope of research.

This study seeks to find an interactive effect between ethical leadership (EL) and corporate governance (CG) variables and investigate whether they would affect employee organizational citizenship behavior (EOCB) in a Malaysian organizational setting. The collected data from the 300 accounting/finance department employees were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and Partial Least Square–Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM; SmartPLS 3.0). Several primary results confirmed a coherent significant relationship between EL and ethical climate (EC), EL and EOCB, EL and CG, and CG and organizational success. Theoretically, it implies a more enhanced EOCB literature on how it can be infused in an organization. It also offers valuable knowledge by providing organizations with several insights concerning the improvement of EOCB, enabling the organization to achieve its desired success and, more importantly, how the findings could contribute directly and indirectly to emerging markets in terms of their industrial and financial performance.

While Dalton and Radtke (2013) examine the effects of Machiavellianism and an organization's ethical environment within a low moral intensity setting, I examine the effects of Machiavellianism and an organization's ethical environment across both low and high moral intensity settings. Using a sample of 192 MTurk workers (i.e., online labor pool participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk) and 127 undergraduate accounting students, the results using the full-sample of participants indicate the following: (1) Machiavellianism is negatively associated with whistle-blowing intentions across both low and high moral intensity scenarios; (2) an organization's ethical environment is positively associated with whistle-blowing intentions across both low and high moral intensity scenarios; and (3) in the low moral intensity scenario (but not the high moral intensity scenario), I find an interaction between Machiavellianism and the strength of the ethical environment. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

We investigate the relationship among the Dark Triad personality traits, ethical fading, and unethical behavior. Our findings suggest that Machiavellianism and psychopathy have a significant relationship with ethical fading such that individuals with high Machiavellianism are more likely to exhibit ethical fading, and individuals with high psychopathy are less likely to exhibit ethical fading. We do not find a significant association between narcissism and ethical fading. In the supplemental analyses, we investigate whether ethical fading leads to more unethical behavior (i.e., fraudulent reporting) and if it mediates the effect of Machiavellianism and psychopathy on unethical behavior. Our findings suggest that, while all the dark traits have a direct effect on unethical behavior, only Machiavellianism has an indirect effect that flows through ethical fading.

This chapter assesses the impact of values change on the likelihood of reporting concerns for a situation of fraudulent financial reporting after a Giving Voice to Values (GVV) ethics intervention. The GVV curriculum shifts focus away from why actions are unethical to how one may effectively voice their values to resolve ethical conflict. After implementing this program in advanced accounting courses and empirically assessing the impact of the ethics intervention, the authors find that students have a stronger sense of the importance of values prescribed in professional codes of conduct and are more likely to speak up and confront unethical actions by voicing their values. GVV has the potential to increase the number of accounting professionals who are willing to speak up and confront unethical practices. The authors’ study appears to be the first to empirically test how a change in the perception of the importance of values impacts the likelihood to report concerns to members of the management hierarchy, filling an important gap in the literature.

This study explores the influence individual characteristics identified in prior research have on ethical choice in a financial reporting task. An action-based, multi-metric dependent variable is developed to measure ethical reporting choice. Intermediate accounting students participate in the task as part of a curricular assignment in a revenue recognition module. Results demonstrate that several, but not all, individual characteristics found in prior research do influence accounting students’ ethical revenue recognition choices. Specifically, the external locus-of-control, idealism, consequentialist, and Machiavellian characteristics are found to influence ethical reporting choice.