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For the financial service industry, company–customer conflict is a topic that deserves special attention. This study explores the impacts of ethics institutionalization on the life insurance agents' ethical decision-making under the company–customer conflicts.

Two types of company–customer conflicts are studied. In one situation, selling the life insurance product is profitable to the life insurance company, but the product is unsuitable for the customer. In another situation, selling the life insurance product is unprofitable to the life insurance company, while the product will fully satisfy the customer's interests. The study selects Taiwan's full-time life insurance agents as a sample.

The main results show that implicit ethics institutionalization has a stronger influence on teleological evaluations and deontological evaluations. This study then finds that different types of company–customer conflicts would change the influences of teleological evaluations on ethical intentions and cause different influences of implicit ethics institutionalization on teleological evaluations and deontological evaluations.

Ethics institutionalization and company–customer conflicts are important issues in the literature. This is the first study to discuss the roles that ethics institutionalization and company–customer conflicts play in the ethical decision-making of life insurance agents.

It was common for newcomers to organizations to feel anxiety and uncertainty. Yet, gaining the newcomers’ trust may contribute to solving these problems. The purpose of this paper is to explore the impacts of explicit ethics institutionalization and management accountability on newcomer trust in manager and company.

A sample of novice salespeople in the life insurance companies in Taiwan was used to investigate the relationships among the constructs.

It was found that newcomers’ recognition of explicit ethics institutionalization was positively associated with the newcomers’ perception of management accountability, and the perception was positively related to trust in manager and company.

Explicit ethics institutionalization and management accountability could play an important role in enhancing newcomer trust. Thus, it was suggested that researchers and managers should focus on these issues and considered how explicit ethics institutionalization and management accountability could be enhanced in the workplace.

Newcomer distrust may lead to newcomer job dissatisfaction and newcomer turnover behaviors. This research examines the mediating role of management accountability in the relationship between explicit ethics institutionalization and newcomer trust.

The purpose of this paper was to examine changes in the contents of Canadian corporate codes of ethics over a period of two decades from an institutionalization perspective.

The paper tracks changes in the contents of the codes of large Canadian corporations longitudinally by analyzing their contents at two points over two decades, in 1992 and 2012. In particular, the paper tests three hypotheses related to the institutionalization of codes.

It was found that the codes have become more prescriptive, they are more concerned with social responsibility and are more likely to identify their moral and legal authority. Overall, the findings support an institutional interpretation of the observed changes.

While large corporations are critical in establishing new and innovative management practices, their selection as the study population limits the generalizabilty of the findings. Another limitation of this paper is that it used an a priori determined set of items to analyze the contents of the codes and while this was needed to facilitate the comparison across time, it also meant that some important items were not clearly identified.

Codes of ethics are the foundation of ethics programs in corporations and their contents could be critical in the development of a culture of ethics in corporations. This paper makes a valuable contribution to research on business ethics by analyzing the codes of ethics of the largest corporations in Canada at two points over two decades. The need to track changes in corporate codes of ethics over time has been advocated by several researchers, but longitudinal studies in this area are rare.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the relational view of unethical pro-organisational behaviour (UPB) to explain interpersonal paths of influence on employees’ engagement in UPB. The proposed relational view of UPB is grounded in Darwall’s second-person philosophy.

This research design involves two quantitative studies – a pilot study with 340 subjects and the main study with 310 employees. The structural equation modelling data analysis was conducted using the R language software.

The findings provided initial support for the relational view of UPB. Study 1 revealed that employees’ accountability (perceived as personal obligation) influenced their engagement in UPB. Furthermore, Study 2 strengthens the theory and findings from Study 1 that employees’ moral organisational identification influences their engagement in UPB over the influence of employees’ identification with the organisation.

The findings extend the nomological network of UPB and extant theoretical knowledge on the moral self by uncovering how moral accountability and personal obligation have a “dark side”.

The findings indicate that practitioners should address the impact of employee interpersonal relationships on their perceived obligation to engage in UPB.

The authors provided an original use of Darwall’s second-person standpoint as the philosophical foundation to integrate accountability and identity theories, to explain interpersonal influences on employees’ engagement in UPB.

Focusing on ethical issues when making organizational decisions should encourage a variety of positive outcomes for companies and their employees. The purpose of this paper is to determine the degree to which data-based ethical decision making, lateral relations and organizational commitment are interrelated in organizations.

Data were collected from business professionals employed at multiple locations of a financial services firm operating in the USA. Mediation analysis (based on structural equation modeling) was used to test the proposed relationships.

Results indicated that employees’ perceptions of data-based ethical decision making were positively related to perceived lateral relations, and that perceived lateral relations were positively related to organizational commitment.

Given that information was collected using only a self-report questionnaire, common method bias could be an issue. In addition, the study’s cross-sectional design limits conclusions about causality. Another limitation involves the study’s homogenous sample, which decreases the generalizability of the findings. Finally, variable responses could have been impacted by individual frames of reference and other perceptual differences.

Results suggest that information flow enhancements should support or be consistent with horizontal information flow enhancements, and that together these factors should increase employee commitment.

Given the dearth of existing research, this interdisciplinary investigation is important because it fills gaps in the management literature. This study is also important because the results could inform decisions regarding the use of data analysis in ethical decisions and lateral forms of organizational structuring to improve work attitudes.

The purpose of this study is to empirically explore how firms configure centrifugal and centripetal forces in promoting breakthrough innovation (BI), thus improving their strategic performance (SP) in the artificial intelligence (AI) context.

This study applies the centrifugal and centripetal forces model to a survey sample of 285 Chinese AI firms. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and propensity score matching (PSM) are integrated to explore the configurational effects of three centrifugal forces—the autonomy of technical experts, knowledge search and alliance network—and two centripetal forces—strictness of organisational institutions (SOI) and human–human–AI collaboration (HHAC)—on BI, examining whether the configurations that enhance BI can further improve SP.

The results indicate that the strictness of innovation institutions (SII) and strictness of ethical institutions (SEI) are equally important for determining SOI. Three configurations can improve BI when SOI and HHAC are the core conditions; only one of three configurations can further improve SP significantly.

By introducing SOI composed of equally important levels of SII and SEI and HHAC, this research is one of the few empirical studies to explore the mechanisms behind the impact of centrifugal and centripetal forces on BI and SP, which may help researchers and managers address innovation challenges in the AI context.

This paper aims to carry out a thematic review of literature on ethics, governance and sustainable practices with regard to workforce engagement and development in the Nigerian hospitality industry.

The review covered the available conceptual and empirical research articles along with a number of alternative sources containing helpful information, such as industry reports and news articles. The review suggests that, for the Nigerian hospitality industry, extant research on ethics, governance and sustainability with regard to workforce management can be categorized into five themes adapted from the categorization of ethical constructs in the work of Tucker et al. (1999) on codes of conduct. These five themes are integrity, equality, economic efficiency and equivalence, distributive and contributive justice and environmental concern.

There appeared to be a high incidence of unethical behaviour in the industry, the most common being maltreatment by employers and dishonesty of employees.

Impressions derived from the study could be inaccurate, given the dearth of research publications in this regard in Nigeria. More empirical research must be done to better understand where industry players need help to be more responsible and sustainable in their business practices and in the way they engage and develop their workforce.

A number of recommendations were made regarding how to entrench ethics and sustainability in hospitality organizations and to develop the workforce in line with this.

The paper is important because of the high reliance on people for competitive advantage in this industry.

This paper aims to, first, investigate the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR)’s various dimensions on organizational commitment and job satisfaction, and, second, to examine the moderating role of employee expectations in this relationship. Studies have increasingly focused the attention on the links between perceptions of CSR and employees’ attitudes. However, a majority of studies do concentrate on internal CSR impact.

A field study based on data from 621 workers. The constructs were measured by validated self-report questionnaires.

The results show that ethical and legal internal and external practices significantly influence the affective organizational commitment. The results also indicate that job satisfaction is positively influenced by internal and external ethico-legal practices as well as by philanthropic practices. Nonetheless, the role of expectation as moderator could not be demonstrated. This matter is discussed in the section dedicated to the limitations of the study.

The originality of the contribution is undoubtedly to have integrated the concept of citizen-worker in this research on CSR.

This paper aims to examine the influence of leadership roles on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities as perceived by employees, as well as their impact on job satisfaction.

Drawing upon a sample of 245 employees in the tourism industry, a structured questionnaire was developed to measure leadership roles and CSR activities as perceived by employees. The competing values model was adopted to operationalize leadership roles.

Results indicate that different leadership roles are linked with different dimensions of CSR activities, although innovator role proved to prevail on this association. More specifically, innovator role is related to all CSR dimensions, followed by monitor which is associated with the philanthropic and environmental dimensions. The broker role is related only to environmental CSR actions.

The possibility to generalize the results to other countries with different characteristics (e.g. regulatory framework, economic development) needs to be investigated further by carrying out similar studies.

Understanding the nature of the association between leadership and CSR activities would enable practitioners to pursue or cultivate these roles and behaviors creating strategic value by fostering their multidimensional impact upon the social context.

The present research has led to the diagnosis of the leadership role profiles supporting CSR strategies in the tourism industry. Findings also highlighted the importance of the innovator leadership role in explaining the variance of different aspects of CSR activities.

This study contributes to the leadership literature by examining how and when despotic leadership jeopardizes employees' performance. Specifically, we examine whether employees' job performance could be harmed by despotic supervision through employees' work withdrawal behaviour. Moreover, we investigate whether the quality of work-life (QWL) helps in toning down the harmful effects of despotic supervision on work withdrawal.

We used a multi-wave research design with data collected from 195 employees and their supervisors working in Pakistan's manufacturing sector. At time 1, we measured the independent variable (i.e. despotic leadership) and moderator (QWL), whereas, at time-2, the mediator (work withdrawal) was tapped by the same respondent with a time interval of three weeks between them. At time 3, the outcome (supervisor-rated job performance) was assessed directly by the supervisors.

The results support the mediating effect between despotic leadership and employees' performance through an enhanced level of work withdrawal behaviour. The effect of despotic leadership on job performance via work withdrawal behaviour was found to be weaker among employees with a higher level of QWL.

For individuals, QWL serves as an enhancement of personal resources to deal with despotic leaders at the workplace; for organizations, our study results alert managers and leaders at the workplace to address employees' need for QWL as this positive resource may discourage work withdrawal behaviour and stimulate employees to perform well in their jobs despite facing despotic supervision.

This study contributes to the leadership literature by introducing work withdrawal as an underlying mechanism to explain the despotic leadership – job performance relationship. Further, we examined how the harmful effects of despotic leadership can be toned down through the moderating variable of QWL thus having practical implications for both employers and employees.