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This study seeks to apply a dual-processing model to understand how ethical leadership prohibits employee unethical behavior through both employee deontic justice and distributive justice.

A survey research was conducted with 62 supervisors and 244 subordinates of 17 firms collected at 2 time points separated by approximately 3 weeks in People's Republic of China.

A multilevel modeling analysis was used to test the dual-processing model. The results showed that both employee deontic justice (moral intuition process) and distributive justice (deliberate reasoning process) significantly mediate the negative relationship between ethical leadership and employee unethical behavior.

As traditional ethics-training approaches mainly focus on developing the deliberate decision-making process driven by distributive justice, the authors' dual-processing model suggests that moral intuition led by deontic justice is equally important and could significantly inhibit employee unethical behavior. Applying the proposed dual-processing model in the ethics training can enhance the effectiveness of employee moral training.

Previous studies have studied the deliberate reasoning process and moral intuition on employee unethical behavior independently. This study contributes to the current literature by a comprehensive dual-processing model which demonstrates equal impact of employee deontic justice and distributive justice led by ethical leadership on the inhibition of employee unethical behavior.

The purpose of the study is to explore the various kind of prevailing unethical practices at workplace along with identification of factors triggering such unethical practices. Growing incidences of indulgence of employees in unethical acts in various organisation and negative consequences associated with it for the organisation such as erosion of reputation because of advance digital media coverage, shareholder value and others made compulsive to study the root cause of unethical behaviour at the workplace.

This study extracts meaning from the experiences of top managers working in nine Indian organisations to understand the challenges faced by individuals at the workplace using the Gioia methodology. A total of 33 top management team (TMT) members were interviewed in detail to capture their experience in regard to various challenges that impose a threat to ethical conduct in the organisation.

The authors identified four categories of unethical behaviour, namely, pro-self, lack of autonomy, pro-organisation, systemic and negligence. Further, the authors have developed a taxonomy suggesting strategies to control unethical conduct at the workplace. Besides, the current study unravels the triggers behind different categories of unethical conduct, such as bottom-line mentality, rent-seeking behaviour of government officials, fluid ethical study culture and others.

Various types of unethical behaviour have been identified and frameworks to address such unethical practices are suggested in the paper. TMTs views have been captured to understand the root cause of unethical practices and strategies for addressing them have been discussed in the paper.

Moral leadership is a common leadership style in Chinese society and is of great significance to Chinese organizations. Unethical employee behavior also widely exists in all kinds of social organizations and brings great harm. The research on the relationship between moral leadership and unethical employee behavior has not been involved yet, but it is important. This paper studies how moral manager (senior leader) leadership trickles down to unethical employee behavior through moral supervisor (employee direct supervisor) leadership, and discusses the moderating effect of LMX and ethical climate.

Through the questionnaire survey of 406 pairs of leaders and employees, and use multilevel path analysis, we test the hypothesis in this paper.

The research results show that (1) Moral manager leadership is negatively related to unethical employee behavior. (2) Moral supervisor leadership mediates the relationship between moral manager leadership and unethical employee behavior. (3) LMX positively moderates the relationship between moral manager leadership and moral supervisor leadership, and moderates the mediating effect of moral supervisor leadership. (4) Ethical climate positively moderates the relationship between moral supervisor leadership and unethical employee behavior, and moderates the mediating effect of moral supervisor leadership.

First, this study further proves that moral leadership is a popular positive leadership among the three dimensions of paternalistic leadership that extends its influence to unethical employee behavior. Second, this study traces the source of the moral leadership of employees' supervisors and reveals the action mechanism of how moral manager leadership affects unethical employee behavior. Finally, LMX provides the organizational context of the trickle-down effect and the occurrence of unethical employee behavior.

The purpose of this study is to explore the mediating effect of moral disengagement in the relationship between mindfulness and unethical behaviors. The authors also explored the moderating effect of perceptions of politics on the mediational chain.

The authors administrated time-lagged surveys at two time periods separated by six weeks. Respondents were 206 full-time employees working in the USA. Hierarchical, moderated multiple regression analyzes were used to test the mediation and moderation effects.

Results showed that mindfulness reduced destructive deviant behavior and unethical pro-organizational behavior through moral disengagement and the mediation effects were weaker when employees’ perceptions of politics were stronger.

The results indicate that mindfulness and perceptions of organizational politics combine to have profound impacts on employee unethical behaviors. Organizations seeking to minimize the occurrence of deviance and unethical behaviors may do well to support employee mindfulness and as well as minimizing organizational politics. The findings suggest that the political context has a negative impact on even the behavior of mindful employees. Therefore, building mindfulness while simultaneously reducing politics are equally important goals.

Our study extends the theoretical development of mindfulness research by examining the interactive effects of perceptions of organizational politics and mindfulness and broadens the theoretical rationale for explaining the linkages between mindfulness and unethical behaviors.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a corporate ethical policy, such as a code of ethics, on the unethical behavior of internal and vendor employees in the supply chain in India. It also aims to find whether International Standards Organization (ISO) certification of vendors affects the result and any significant relationship between management commitment and unethical behavior can be supported by the findings as well.

Empirical analyses were conducted on a survey consisting of 43 questions comprising 181 valid responses. Multiple regression analysis that includes four independent variables – code of ethics, management commitment, supply chain principles and personal values taking unethical behavior as dependent variable – was used to find the significance of the relationship.

The implementation of a code of ethics, management commitment, supply chain principles and personal values all have a negative association with unethical behavior. Personal values, measuring a firm’s financial aspects for non-compliance to ethical behavior, have a positive association with unethical behavior. The relationships of top management commitment, personal values with internal employees’ unethical behavior are significant. The significant relationship between management commitment and unethical behavior can be supported by the findings as well. It was also found that ISO certificates and firm size as the control variables did not have any effect on the relationship between the independent variables and unethical behavior. The analysis also shows that ISO 26000 certificate, the international standard for socially responsible operations, does not impact this relationship.

Measuring substantial managerial effort for corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices by asking questions like, “how committed employees think top management is to social responsibility,” may not fully measure substantial managerial effort for CSR practices. To improve the results of the current study, future research can use the CSR index or disclosure as a measure to better reflect management commitment and practice for social responsibility. Second, the current study is limited to measuring how many occurrences of unethical behavior are witnessed by employees instead of what specific unethical behavior is more often witnessed. Considering India has the second largest population in the world, 181 responses may not represent the true practices in the business environment in India for generalization.

The findings suggest that management should put more of an emphasis on improving the commitment of upper-level managers to decrease the overall unethical practices of their employees. The study finds that employees’ personal values influence their ethical behavior. Therefore, communications and training of employees at all levels should emphasis on improving personal values.

Businesses should influence academics to incorporate personal value building in course curricula. The Indian CSR law should incorporate the holistic view of CSR taking care of needs of all stakeholders under the provision of the regulation. In 2015, India became the first country in the world to legislate CSR practices in corporations but it misses the opportunity to sensitize the management and employees on ethical practices as it mainly identified philanthropic expenses as mandatory CSR spending and silent on ethical business practices.

The present study contributes to the literature by bringing supply chain context to the effect of different factors on unethical behaviors and interaction of internal and vendor firms in terms of ethical practices. There are several studies on business ethics in different countries including China, but in the case of India similar studies are not much. The present study fills the gap.

Conducting research on the relationship between benevolent leadership and unethical employee behavior can help us find solutions to reduce unethical employee behavior. This paper also discusses how the benevolent manager leadership can be transmitted to the employee's unethical behavior through the benevolent supervisor leadership and the moderating effect of LMX and ethical climate.

Through a questionnaire survey of 406 pairs of leaders, supervisor and employees, the authors use data aggregation test, confirmatory factor analysis, descriptive statistics and multilevel model (HLM) to test our hypothesis.

(1) Manager supervisor leadership is negatively related to unethical employee behavior, (2) benevolent supervisor leadership mediates the relationship between benevolent manager leadership and unethical employee behavior, (3) LMX positively moderates the relationship between benevolent manager leadership and benevolent supervisor leadership and moderates the mediating effect of benevolent supervisor leadership, and (4) ethical climate positively moderates the relationship between benevolent supervisor leadership and unethical employee behavior and moderates the mediating effect of benevolent supervisor leadership.

First, based on previous studies, this study further proves that benevolent leadership is a popular positive leadership among the three dimensions of paternalistic leadership that extends its influence to unethical employee behavior. Second, the study traces the source of the benevolent leadership of employees' supervisors and reveals the action mechanism of how benevolent manager leadership affects unethical employee behavior (trickle-down effect). LMX and the ethical climate provide the organizational context of the trickle-down effect and the occurrence of unethical employee behavior.

This study aims to investigate how Chinese hotel employees (Zhejiang province in mainland China) perceive unethical managerial behavior. It targets to identify any underlying dimensions that exist among the hotel employees. This study also aims to discover any relationship between overall job satisfaction and the derived dimensions. The effects of demographic variables on employees’ job satisfaction and its relationship with unethical managerial behavior are also investigated. Recommendations are presented to hoteliers and human resources practitioners on developing an ethical climate in the hotel industry.

Quantitative mixed methods incorporated both in-depth interviews on identifying 20 unethical managerial behaviors among hotel employees, and statistical analyses of the dimensions of the said behaviors were applied to this research. As quantitative analysis was the principal data analysis method adopted to test the hypotheses on hotel employees’ perception of unethical managerial behavior and job satisfaction, a self-administrated questionnaire was developed. A total of 268 completed questionnaires were collected, and factor analysis, multiple regression, independent t-test and ANOVA were conducted to analyze the data.

Three factors of unethical managerial behavior were developed: unethical treatment of employees; unfair and broken promises to employees; and inequity and unsympathetic treatment of employees. “Unethical treatment of employees” was found to be significantly related to overall job satisfaction among hotel employees in multiple regression analysis. Demographic differences were also found to exert effects on the three factors and overall job satisfaction.

This paper successfully identified three underlying dimensions that exist among Chinese hotel employees’ perception of unethical managerial behavior. Three recommendations are presented to hoteliers as well as human resources practitioners for developing an ethical climate in the hotel industry.

This study contributes to advance the understanding of the hotel employees’ perception of unethical managerial behavior. The relationship between job satisfaction and the derived three underlying dimensions is discovered.

It is generally believed that supervisors would deter employee unethical behavior. However, drawing from social exchange theory and the theory of moral disengagement, we posit that supervisors are more willing to tolerate employee unethical behavior through moral disengagement when the perpetrator is a high performing employee.

Study 1, which measured employee unethical behavior in a specific group of doctors through a time-lagged survey, and Study 2, which manipulated employee unethical behavior with a diverse sample by a vignette-based experiment, provided convergent support for our hypothesized 1st-stage moderated mediation model. Hierarchical regression, bootstrapping and ANOVA are used to test our hypotheses.

Although supervisors generally showed a low social acceptance of an employee who engaged in unethical behavior, they were more likely to socially accept the perpetrator through moral disengagement when the employee was a high rather than a low performer.

Given that supervisor's tolerance of employee unethical behavior may be more dangerous than employee unethical behavior itself, organizations should set up an ethics committee to handle top managers' unethical behavior and consider morality equally important with performance in management practice.

The current research extends research on the interpersonal consequences of employee unethical behavior, explains how moral disengagement promotes social acceptance and identifies the moderating effect of job performance in the process.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of stretch goals on unethical behavior and explore the mediating role of ambivalent identification and moderating role of competitive psychological climate.

A total of 350 MBA students from Northwestern China completed the two-phase survey. The bootstrapping analysis outlined by Hayes was used to assess a moderated mediation model.

This study found that stretch goals could trigger employees' unethical behavior via ambivalent identification. Competitive psychological climate intensified the relationship between stretch goals and ambivalent identification. Moreover, such a climate aggravated the indirect effect of stretch goals on unethical behavior via ambivalent identification.

Organizations and managers should use stretch goals prudently and implement measures to reduce the ethical cost.

This study provides unique contributions by identifying ambivalent identification as an important mediator and competitive psychological climate as a boundary condition of stretch goals' disruptive effect on unethical behavior.

By applying displaced aggression and conservation of resource theory, this paper aims to investigate the effect of supervisors’ workplace stress over subordinates' unethical behavior through displaced aggression as an underlying mechanism. Moreover, it tests the moderating effect of despotic leadership between supervisors’ workplace stress and displaced aggression.

The data consists of three hierarchy levels: despotic leadership (top manager), supervisor’s (immediate supervisor/middle manager) workplace stress and displaced aggression and subordinates’ unethical behavior. The data was collected from 80 managers about their workplace stress and displaced aggression besides perceived unethical behavior of their 240 subordinates.

The data analysis of 80 bank managers of Pakistan about their perception of top managers’ despotic behavior and unethical behavior of their 240 subordinates shows the support for all hypothesized relationships. Supervisors’ workplace stress positively affected their displaced aggression over their subordinates, which motivated subordinates to engage in unethical behavior. Moreover, the findings supported the moderating effect of despotic leadership in the relationship between supervisors’ workplace stress and displaced aggression.

This study contributes to the limited studies on the trickledown displaced aggression phenomenon in the service (banking) sector. Moreover, the manager’s despotic leadership role as a higher-level negative supervisory behavior in increasing the supervisors’ displaced aggression shows the critical aspect in such a stressful workplace situation.