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This paper aims to examine the relationship between ethics programmes and ethical culture, and their impact on misconduct.

A theoretical model which posits ethical culture to be a mediating variable in the relationship between ethics programmes and misconduct was tested using data from a national ethics survey of Korean public service organizations.

The data indicates the relationship between ethics programmes and misconduct is fully mediated by ethical culture. Only two of the six elements of an ethics programme had a significant effect on misconduct before ethical culture was controlled for, and when ethical culture was controlled for, none of the elements had a significant impact on misconduct. The ethics programme did however appear to strengthen ethical culture, suggesting such programmes make an important contribution to reducing unethical behaviour in organizations.

Future research should examine the interaction of ethics programmes and ethical culture using longitudinal research designs, to obtain a better understanding of how programmes serve to strengthen ethical culture.

The findings provide insights into the role of ethics programmes in improving ethical behaviour, suggesting resources should be deployed to those aspects of these programmes which serve to strengthen ethical culture.

The paper provides clarification of the relationship between ethics programmes, ethical culture and misconduct, an important finding given the significant resources deployed by public service organizations to initiatives aimed at improving ethical behaviour.

While there is no dearth of studies on ethical issues, the specific subject of examination misconduct has attracted fewer studies, especially in Africa. This study is an ongoing exploratory attempt to develop a measure of examination misconduct. Self‐administered questionnaires were used to collect data from 450 undergraduate business students of the Universities of Botswana and Swaziland. A nine‐item measure of examination misconduct was correlated with a measure of perception of business ethics, ethical value assessment and Hofstede's four dimensions of culture. The results indicated significant inter‐correlations among the variables (especially the three measures of ethics) and limited construct validity for the examination misconduct scale. The results of factor analysis suggest three factors for the emerging scale: cheating behaviour, intervention and desperation. The ethical inferences of the findings, managerial implications for university administrators and practitioners, study limitations and directions for future research are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether, and under what conditions, an individual’s punitive intent in response to ethical misconduct is shaped by their perceived forgiveness climate, which is their perception of how forgiving their organization is.

This study used the survey method embedded within a vignette-based experiment involving working adults.

Results show that higher perceived forgiveness climate is associated with lower punitive intent when an experience of being forgiven is salient to the disciplinary decision maker and when there are mitigating circumstances surrounding the ethical misconduct. When an experience of being unforgiven is salient to the disciplinary decision maker, higher perceived forgiveness climate is associated with higher punitive intent.

This study presents a more nuanced perspective on the conditions that shape punishment decision making in response to workplace ethical misconduct. As the findings may be specific to the measures and vignette used, future research should explore the replicability of these results using other measures and types of ethical misconduct.

The paper alerts disciplinary decision makers to the potential influence of their perceptions of the organizational context and of their personal experiences on their punishment decision making, helping avoid inappropriately punishing subordinates, which can generate employee resentment and inflated turnover.

This is the first study that examined the relationship between forgiveness and punishment in response to ethical misconduct in a workplace setting.

The Framers of the Constitution granted Congress the ability to punish members for misconduct to protect the institution's integrity and dignity. However, with the low approval ratings of Congress and the widespread belief that those in government are corrupt, the institution has not done an excellent job at protecting its integrity. This chapter examines all allegations investigated by the House and Senate Ethics Committees to determine if Congress has systematically punished misconduct among members. Using data on 396 misconduct investigations in Congress, this research examines the institution's likelihood of punishing a member before and after implementing permanent ethics committees in the 90th Congress. The study reveals that Congress was more likely to systematically punish members for ethical misconduct before permanently installing ethics committees. However, in the contemporary period, the only type of misconduct a member is likely to be punished for is sexual harassment. Yet, the likelihood of being punished for sexual harassment falls when a member resigns or strategically retires.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to point out the importance of having an ethics-related course for human resource development (HRD) graduate programs; and second, to highlight HRD potential to minimize ethical misconducts through an ethical filter in organizations.

This paper is conceptual in nature. The authors used their own experiences in HRD programs, looked at HRD graduate programs’ curricula in different universities and reviewed literature on ethics and HRD to develop a conceptual model. The model is to guide future studies and identify the role of HRD practices to create an ethical climate in organizations.

In this paper, the authors illustrate the connection between HRD practices and ethical climate in organizations by providing a conceptual framework. In the concluding paragraphs, the authors provide a discussion, implications and recommendations for future studies.

The authors highlight the limited research conducted on how ethics and ethical dilemmas need to be represented in HRD practitioners’ activities and practices. Many graduate-level HRD students do not receive enough training on ethics, whereas it is their responsibility to help improve organizational ethical climate and educate and prepare human resources to minimize ethical misconducts and wrongdoings. The paper provides a framework for HRD practitioners to create a strong ethical climate in their organizations.

Studies showed that construction consultants' ethical negligence is a contributing factor to the time and cost over-run of projects. There is limited research on the issues that may have hindered construction consultants' ethical responsiveness during contract administration. Studies regarding influencing factors in the context of Nigeria's quantity surveyors' (QS) ethical responsiveness are rare. Thus, the study aims to investigate the perceived issues and proffers initiatives to promote QSs' ethical responsiveness on construction projects in Nigeria.

To determine the perceptions of QS regarding ethical responsiveness, a phenomenologically driven perspective via face-to-face interviews was conducted with 12 senior professionals in Lagos and Abuja that showed interest in participating in the study and were interviewed. A thematic approach was adopted to analyse the collated data.

Economic, societal and professional issues emerged as the three groups of issues that hindered QS's ethical responsiveness on construction projects in a developing country setting such as Nigeria. Findings show that for ethical responsiveness to be expressed on projects, key stakeholders should be ethically responsible. This is currently missing, especially in public construction projects. Initiatives that can promote key stakeholders' ethical responsiveness on construction projects are examined in this paper.

The paper embraces an important practical implication because practices associated with QS's unethical responsiveness and behavioural impacts on construction projects were identified. This will stir both the regulatory professional bodies and policymakers to enforce and implement feasible initiatives that can promote key stakeholders' collaborative ethical responsiveness on construction projects.

This paper is amongst the few papers that attempted to uncover issues that hinder QS's ethical responsiveness on construction projects in a developing country setting via a qualitative approach. Since these issues are rampant in developing countries, findings from this paper can be used to promote QS's ethical responsiveness in other nations with similar unethical issues.

Corporate scandals involving senior executives plague many businesses. Although customers and noncustomers may be exposed to news of the same scandal, they may appraise dimensions of the transgression differently, thereby affecting post-scandal patronage intentions. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether and how consumer-firm affiliation affects future patronage intentions by examining nuances in customers’ vs noncustomers’ reactions toward the transgressor’s professional performance and immoral behavior.

Four between-subjects experimental studies were used to test whether performance-relevant and/or immorality-relevant pathways drive customers’ vs noncustomers’ post-scandal patronage intentions. The results were analyzed using analysis of variance, parallel mediation and serial mediation.

The results demonstrate that performance judgment, and not immorality judgment, drive the relationship between consumer-firm affiliation and post-scandal patronage intentions (Study 1a), regardless of the order of information presented (Study 1b). Customers form more positive performance judgments because they give more weight to performance-related information (Study 2), demonstrating a sequential effect of consumer-firm affiliation on post-scandal patronage intentions only through the performance-relevant, and not immorality-relevant, pathway (Study 3).

This research contributes to the literature on social distance and moral judgments. Future research should examine other deleterious outcomes such as brand sabotage and negative word-of-mouth, as well as potential moderators including repeated transgressions and prevalence of the infraction in other firms.

This research offers important nuances for understanding how performance and immorality judgments differentially operate and affect post-scandal patronage intentions. The findings highlight the strategic value of communicating the leader’s performance (e.g. professional contributions) as a buffer against potential declining patronage.

Offering new insights into the extant literature and lay beliefs which contend that harsh moral judgment reduces patronage intentions, this research uncovers why and how exposure to the same scandal can result in varying moral judgments that subsequently influence patronage intentions. Importantly, this research shows that the performance-relevant pathway can explain why customers have higher post-scandal patronage intentions compared to noncustomers.

The “academic revolution” that has taken place over the past 50-60 years has brought about many opportunities, but also challenges, in the lives of academics. The “publish or perish” phenomenon can be seen as one manifestation of the heated competition among universities for talent and resources. The resulting increase in publications, the decrease in the time academics have to read them, together with editors’ call for more originality, innovation, and meaning in submitted manuscripts lead to two questions. What techniques can help researchers and PhD students to effectively and efficiently navigate through large bodies of literature? What tools and techniques can be used to enhance the foundations for theorising? The purpose of this paper is to answer these two interrelated questions.

The abstracts of 410 peer-reviewed journal articles connected to ethics in (international) marketing research are explored with software tools. The freely available VOSviewer software is used to visualise the specified body of literature. NVivo is employed to go deeper and explore specific themes identified through VOSviewer.

A total of 17 clusters were identified, representing the major themes in the selected body of literature. Additionally, a number of research avenues and research questions are presented.

The analysis is based on the information provided in abstracts. Future research may wish to extend the analysis to full articles.

The paper contributes by demonstrating how software tools such as VOSviewer and NVivo can be used to explore large bodies of literature and to experiment with research ideas to enhance the foundations for theorising.

Prior studies have extensively explored individual examples of unethical behavior in sales organizations but focused little on repeated violation (RV) of ethical codes, particularly when managers develop salesforces. Based on social learning theory (SLT), the authors propose a multilevel model of RV antecedents and suggest that organizational influence (social cues and modeling) and individual factors (observer characteristics and behavioral outcomes) affect RV, especially with increasing recruitment of salespeople.

Using data from a leading financial company in Taiwan, the authors analyzed 1,231 records of salespeople’s misbehavior through logistic regression and average marginal effects.

Modeling in the organization (i.e. peer misconduct), observer characteristics (i.e. experience concerning job tenure and prior violations) and behavioral outcomes (i.e. information concealment violations) were all found to affect the likelihood of RV, and the interactional effect of organizational size was confirmed.

This study contributes to ethical decision-making theory by explaining aspects of RV through SLT. Its multilevel model, integrated with organizational strategy theories, adds an SLT-focused paradigm into unethical behavior research by considering vicarious learning and self-learning, alongside the reciprocal determinism of cognition, behavior, and environment.

Managers should consider socially based patterns of violation when initiating a sales business plan. The chances of RV are increased by unethical models in the organization and offenders’ potential for violations, which is reinforced by social environment.

This study clarified the key drivers of RV decision-making using SLT and identified an effective sales development strategy to maintain an ethically responsible salesforce.

This study aims to gauge business school student perceptions of the academic conduct of college professors, to determine students' ethical evaluations of certain potential faculty behaviors. The relationships between perceived faculty misconduct and several student demographic characteristics including sex and academic classification were also investigated.

A large sample of undergraduate students attending one of two diverse universities responded to an anonymous survey. Responses were analyzed using univariate and multivariate statistical methods.

Behaviors such as giving lower grades because of opposing opinions in the classroom and sharing an undergraduate student's private information with colleagues were rated the most harshly by student respondents. The 55 items that we used to measure professors' academic misconduct distilled into two basic dimensions: “inappropriate sexual situations” involving students and coworkers and “inappropriate familiarity with students.” Student sex and academic classification were related to one or both of these dimensions.

The study did not address whether faculty misconduct might be seen as incompetent by the students rather than unethical. The survey also did not ascertain if or how often the student respondents had observed the behaviors that they judged as unethical or ethical.

Faculty who wish to be more effective teachers and role models should realize their behaviors are being scrutinized and evaluated by students who make ethical judgments about teacher conduct.

The study makes an important contribution by distilling 55 established items on ethical behaviors into two durable ethics scales regarding faculty‐student relationships: “inappropriate sexual situations” and “inappropriate familiarity with students.” These scales can be applied in future research.