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To construct effective compliance programmes, the phenomenon of non-compliance and variations in its abidance must be elucidated. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the social reality of ethical decision making, which examines the internalisation of moral norms and realities of social behaviour and, therefore, the general non-compliance with everyday laws (Tyler, 2006).

This paper makes use of several social theories, including social proof theory, traditional social theory and social control theory. Humans are social beings, and decision-making in ethics is strongly influenced by herding behaviour (Roy, 2021). The behaviour of others and normative ethical standards inform the compliance of behaviour to an undiminishable degree.

Although there is a host of factors to consider, the success of compliance can largely be attributed to people’s perception and reception of authority. The perception of authority and legitimacy plays a vital role in appreciating the complexity of rule following. Legitimacy, and its embodiment by persons in public roles, is a cornerstone of the subsequent discussion.

This paper uncovers the underlying motivations of non-compliance as well as the social psychology involved in the ethics of compliance. Cross-disciplinary connections are made between the private and public sector and practical compliance recommendations. The significant impact of integrity culture and value-based compliance emerges from the dissection of the social reality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the perceptions and effects of social value orientation, expected utility, fairness in procurement procedures, the legitimacy of the procurement law and the procurement law enforcement authority on compliance with the procurement law, guidelines, procedures and regulations. Empirical research in this area is relatively sparse.

Data were collected from a sample of 110 Procurement and Disposing Entities (PDEs) and analysed using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM).

Results of the fit indices between the model and the observed data were generally good for both CFA and SEM. Results reveal that social value orientation, expected utility, legitimacy of the procurement law enforcement agency and perceptions of procedural justice were significant predictors of the Public Procurement and Disposal of Assets Authority (PPDA) regulatory agency.

This study however has several limitations which limit the interpretation of results. First, the data are cross sectional, thus limiting monitoring changes in behaviour over time. Second, all item scales adapted in this study were not specifically developed for a public procurement regulatory environment. This means that there is need to develop specific item scales for public procurement regulatory environments.

The paper shows that the PPDA regulatory framework should revise its compliance instrument to consider social value orientation.

This paper uses constructs of social value orientation, which are largely ignored in legislated professions to predict compliance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the intended and unintended consequences of compliance and auditing pressures in the Bangladeshi garment industry. To explore this issue the authors draw on three medium-sized suppliers. The institutional changes that followed the Rana Plaza accident in April 2013 make Bangladesh in general and the garment industry in particular an interesting and suitable research setting for standards compliance.

The study adopts a multiple case study approach. Face-to-face interviews have been conducted with the owners of three Bangladeshi garment manufacturing firms and several workers. Additionally, organisational documents and local newspaper articles had been collected wherever possible.

The results indicate that the pressure for compliance has led the case companies to prioritise the implementation of measurable standards over the socially grounded needs and priorities of workers. As a consequence certain initiatives instead of adding new social value in fact destroyed previously existing social value. Furthermore, the pressure for compliance created the necessity to find ways to cover the sizable cost of compliance. This prompted firms to pursue process upgrading through technological advancements and increased work pressures on the labour force. These initiatives led to an increased power imbalance and the exclusion of unskilled workers from the job market.

The paper contributes to the understanding of the human rights implications of compliance and auditing pressures and initiatives. Furthermore, in order to further enrich existing knowledge in the critical accounting literature, the study draws on insights from the global value chains (GVC) and international business (IB) literatures.

The paper contributes to the understanding of the human rights implications of compliance and auditing pressures and initiatives. Furthermore, in order to further enrich existing knowledge in the critical accounting literature, the study draws on insights from the GVC and IB literatures.

Tragic incidents such as the Rana Plaza building collapse call into question the value and effectiveness of supplier codes of conduct (SCC) used in multi-tier supply chains. This paper aims to investigate the barriers to sub-supplier compliance and the drivers from the perspective of suppliers that adopt a double agency role by complying with buyer-imposed SCC while managing sub-supplier compliance on behalf of the buyer.

This research adopts a sequential, mixed-methods approach. The qualitative phase develops a conceptual model with the aid of the extant the literature and semi-structured interviews with 24 senior manufacturing professionals. The quantitative phase then uses a hierarchical regression analysis to test the conceptual model using survey data from 159 apparel suppliers based in India.

The findings reveal that sub-supplier compliance is positively impacted by effective buyer–supplier governance and by the focal supplier having a strategic partnership with the sub-supplier. Conversely, price pressure on sub-suppliers adversely impacts their compliance, while institutional pressure on them to comply is generally ineffective.

The context of the study is limited to the garment industry in India.

To improve SCC compliance rates, buyers and focal suppliers should actively develop strategic partnerships with selected upstream supply chain actors; should set a reasonable price across the supply chain; and, should include specific sub-supplier compliance requirements within the supply contract. The findings also suggest the need to develop social sustainability protocols that are cognisant of regional contexts.

The absence of prior research on SCC implementation by sub-suppliers, this study represents a pioneering empirical study into such multi-tier sourcing arrangements. It provides strong support that sub-supplier governance arrangements differ from those typically found in the focal supplier layer. It also provides empirical evidence of the critical factors that encourage sub-supplier compliance within the apparel industry of a regionally developing economy.

The workplace health management lessons to be learned from the pandemic are important. However, few studies have examined the relationship between workplace anxiety, resources and behaviors during the pandemic. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the relationship between anxiety, fatigue, compliance, turnover intention and social and psychological resources during the COVID-19 pandemic by applying the conservation of resources (COR) theory.

Path analysis was carried out using data obtained from a questionnaire survey conducted on 2,973 Chinese employees of Japanese companies in China.

The analysis showed that anxiety had a positive correlation with compliance, but simultaneously had a positive correlation with fatigue and turnover intention; psychological resources moderated to weaken the relationships between anxiety and compliance/fatigue; social resources moderated to strengthen the negative correlation between compliance and willingness to leave.

This study targeted employees of Japanese companies in China. Therefore, in the future, it is necessary to verify generalizability as to whether it applies to employees of companies of other nationalities in other countries. Also, the authors used newly developed scales instead of the general psychological scales. Therefore, it is necessary to verify the reproducibility using a more general scale.

Anxiety encourages compliance practices but also increases fatigue and willingness to leave. Therefore, a method of inciting anxiety and making employees follow rules reduces the strength of an organization. To overcome this dilemma, managers need to provide psychological and social resources.

This study is the first to show how effective social and psychological resources are in the management of anxiety and fatigue in achieving high performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study was conducted in the very early days of the COVID-19 pandemic with the cooperation of employees working for Japanese companies in China. However, the importance of utilizing resources in a crisis revealed by this study can be applied to all kinds of disasters.

Highlights:

-The current study is the result of a survey conducted on employees of Japanese companies in China in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

-Anxiety had a positive effect of promoting compliance and a negative effect of increasing fatigue and willingness to leave the job.

-Psychological resources mitigated these effects of anxiety and, as a result, reduced fatigue and willingness to leave.

-Social resources enhanced the effect of compliance on reducing willingness to leave.

-Workplace health problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic should be addressed by increasing employee resources on a regular basis, rather than aggravating anxiety.

Government seeks to realize its economic objectives and eventually its social objectives as well through taxation. In a Muslim-majority economy, besides many types of taxation imposed, some government also legally enforced an alms tax (Zakat) via specific authority. The purpose of this study is to examine the role of enforcement in Zakat compliance and how it can enhance the effect of social motivations, namely perceived institutional credibility and social pressure, on zakat payers' compliance decisions.

This research is underpinned by economic deterrence theory and employed data collected through a cross-sectional approach. A total of 274 Yemeni entrepreneurs responded to the questionnaire and analysed using SmartPLS version 3.2.9.

The study finds that social pressure and institutional credibility are significantly related to entrepreneurs' compliance with Zakat. Importantly, enforcement-moderated interactions of social pressure and perceived credibility on Zakat payers' compliance are statistically significant.

Some signals emerged from the results which could be used by governments throughout the Muslim-majority state to mitigate Zakat evasion amongst entrepreneurs. Furthermore, the study can provide information to Zakat authorities and policymakers on how to restore public trustworthiness and increase Zakat collection from entrepreneurs as well as cautioning such authorities that social pressure may possess an unfavourable attitude towards Zakat laws, influencing Zakat payers to do this action itself.

This study provides a shred of unique evidence by suggesting a new approach to the Zakat literature and linking the deterrence-based enforcement and social motivation with practice, which contributes to strengthening compliance levels amongst entrepreneurs and ultimately enhancing Zakat funds.

The purpose of this paper is to understand from the knowledge management perspective how the mechanism of different voluntary compliance behaviors works and how information technology is used for compliance management in corporate settings where privacy and security issues are getting critical due to the advancement of big data and artificial intelligence.

In this study, the authors propose a structural model based on the theory of planned behavior and the IT relatedness theory that behavioral belief about compliance and social pressure affect compliance knowledge and compliance intention, and compliance knowledge partially mediates the impact of both independent variables on compliance intention. The authors surveyed with a structured questionnaire 975 employees of a major Korean energy company, S-OIL, which deploys a compliance support system. The respondents are classified into two groups: an Active IT Utilization Group and a Passive IT Utilization Group.

The results of our empirical examination show that compliance intention belief and social pressure influence compliance intention, and further, that compliance behavior is mediated by compliance knowledge – in both the active IT utilization group and the passive IT utilization group. However, the significance of each path coefficient, R square and the mediation effect in Model 1 (passive IT utilization group) are obviously a poor contrast to Model 2 (active IT utilization group). Also, the path from behavioral belief to compliance knowledge and social pressure to compliance knowledge show a significant moderating effect of IT utilization level.

This paper aims to promote more effective voluntary compliance behavior by increasing the understanding of the impact differences of the preceding factors, and the ways in which those are related to the knowledge management practice in terms of both knowledge itself and its support systems, i.e. compliance support system.

Understanding the behavioral change process of system users to adopt safe security practices is important to the success of an organization’s cybersecurity program. This study aims to explore how the 7Ps (product, price, promotion, place, physical evidence, process and people) marketing mix, as part of an internal social marketing approach, can be used to gain an understanding of employees’ interactions within an organization’s cybersecurity environment. This understanding could inform the design of servicescapes and behavioral infrastructure to promote and maintain cybersecurity compliance.

This study adopted an inductive qualitative approach using in-depth interviews with employees in several Vietnamese organizations. Discussions were centered on employee experiences and their perceptions of cybersecurity initiatives, as well as the impact of initiatives on compliance behavior. Responses were then categorized under the 7Ps marketing mix framework.

The study shows that assessing a cybersecurity program using the 7P mix enables the systematic capture of users’ security compliance and acceptance of IT systems. Additionally, understanding the interactions between system elements permits the design of behavioral infrastructure to enhance security efforts. Results also show that user engagement is essential in developing secure systems. User engagement requires developing shared objectives, localized communications, co-designing of efficient processes and understanding the “pain points” of security compliance. The knowledge developed from this research provides a framework for those managing cybersecurity systems and enables the design human-centered systems conducive to compliance.

The study is one of the first to use a cross-disciplinary social marketing approach to examine how employees experience and comply with security initiatives. Previous studies have mostly focused on determinants of compliance behavior without providing a clear platform for management action. Internal social marketing using 7Ps provides a simple but innovative approach to reexamine existing compliance approaches. Findings from the study could leverage proven successful marketing techniques to promote security compliance.

The purpose of this study is to develop a method to assess social performance. Traditionally, environment, social and governance (ESG) rating providers use subjectively weighted arithmetic averages to combine a set of social performance (SP) indicators into one single rating. To overcome this problem, this study investigates the preconditions for a new methodology for rating the SP component of the ESG by applying machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) anchored to social controversies.

This study proposes the use of a data-driven rating methodology that derives the relative importance of SP features from their contribution to the prediction of social controversies. The authors use the proposed methodology to solve the weighting problem with overall ESG ratings and further investigate whether prediction is possible.

The authors find that ML models are able to predict controversies with high predictive performance and validity. The findings indicate that the weighting problem with the ESG ratings can be addressed with a data-driven approach. The decisive prerequisite, however, for the proposed rating methodology is that social controversies are predicted by a broad set of SP indicators. The results also suggest that predictively valid ratings can be developed with this ML-based AI method.

This study offers practical solutions to ESG rating problems that have implications for investors, ESG raters and socially responsible investments.

The proposed ML-based AI method can help to achieve better ESG ratings, which will in turn help to improve SP, which has implications for organizations and societies through sustainable development.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of the first studies that offers a unique method to address the ESG rating problem and improve sustainability by focusing on SP indicators.

As supply chain sustainability has become more urgent than ever before, this study aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of how supplying firms’ sustainability motives influence their compliance and commitment, as well as sustainable performance, as they respond to buyers’ sustainable supplier management programs.

To investigate the intriguing links among sustainability motives, compliance/commitment and sustainable performance of supplying firms, this paper draws on multidisciplinary literature and collects empirical data from 281 supplying firms in China to test the proposed model and hypotheses using structural equation modeling.

Instrumental and moral motives make comparable contributions to compliance; moral motives exert stronger influence on firms’ commitment to sustainable practices. In addition, although compliance has a greater impact on economic and environmental performance, commitment is far more robust in improving environmental and social performance.

Unlike most research on motives that has been theoretical, this study represents one of the few empirical analyses of how motives may affect sustainable performance. Examining the challenges from the perspectives of supplying firms, it also adds to the SSCM literature by making clear how compliance and commitment may differentially predict sustainable performance.

Although instrumental and moral motives can be complementary in advancing sustainable practices, it is imperative for firms to integrate moral considerations into sustainability decision-making and move beyond compliance, if they are to contribute meaningfully to a better society and cleaner environment.

This is the first large-scale empirical investigation on the links among motives, compliance, commitment and sustainable performance from the perspectives of suppliers.