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This study aims to examine the relationship between selfishness, moral justification and intention to fraud among accounting certified professionals. It focuses on the role of moral justification in explaining the link between selfishness and intention to fraud.

Data were collected with the help of a structured questionnaire. The final sample includes 240 accounting certified professionals. To test the hypothesized model in this study, IBM AMOS ver26 was used to perform the structural equation modeling.

The results of this study show that selfishness has no direct impact on the intention to commit fraud. However, selfishness does have a positive impact on moral justification. Furthermore, the study found that moral justification mediates the relationship between selfishness and fraud intention.

This study provides important implications for accounting firms and other organizations and recommends that they implement the necessary practices to reduce the fraudulent intentions of certified accounting professionals while simultaneously reducing selfishness and moral justification.

This research is among the few studies in the accounting field that address the mediating role of moral justification in the relationship between selfishness and fraud intention among certified accounting professionals.

How is moral legitimacy established in pluralist contexts where multiple moral frameworks co-exist and compete? Situations of moral multiplexity complicate not only whether an organization or practice is legitimate but also which criteria should be used to establish moral legitimacy. We argue that moral legitimacy can be thought of as the property of a dynamic dialogical process in which relations between moral schemes are constantly (re-)negotiated through dynamic exchange with audiences. Drawing on Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘orders of worth’ framework, we propose a process model of how three types of truces may be negotiated: transcendence, compromise, antagonism. While each can create moral legitimacy in pluralistic contexts, legitimacy is not a binary variable but varying in degrees of scope and certainty.

Despite an emerging interest in constructive deviance, the exploration of its antecedents is still limited, particularly from an ethical perspective. This study aims to uses moral disengagement theory to investigate how team identification, moral justification and team environmental instability interact to affect employee constructive deviance.

With survey data collected in two waves from 315 employees of 49 work teams in five service companies in China, this study develops four hypotheses and tests them through hierarchical linear model.

The survey results support the complete mediating effect of moral justification on the positive impact of team identification on constructive deviance. They also confirm the moderating effect of environmental instability on the relationship between team identification, moral justification and constructive deviance.

This study explores the sources of constructive deviance at team level from the ethical decision-making perspective and reveals the mechanism and contingency factors in the relationship between identity and constructive deviance. In practice, the study findings imply that managers should encourage their employees to cultivate their identification with their team and align their moral justification with the team’s norms especially when the team faces turbulent environment.

This paper aims to investigate the mediating and moderating roles of mindfulness in explaining the influences of performance goal attributes (e.g. difficulty, specificity and performance pressure), moral justification and peer unethical sales behavior on unintentional unethical behavior in the sales context. In this study, goal attributes and peer unethical sales behavior are proposed to positively impact unethical selling behavior. Especially, mindfulness and moral justification are explored as mediators of these relationships. Moreover, mindfulness also moderates the influence of peer’s unethical sales behavior on moral justification.

A sample of 188 salespeople working in companies in Vietnam is included to test the conceptual framework. Partial least squares structural equations modeling and SmartPLS v3 were implemented to test the path model.

This study highlights the mediating and moderating roles of mindfulness in explaining unintentional unethical behavior. The findings indicate that sales performance goals negatively influence mindfulness and positively influence unethical behavior. In the mediating role, mindfulness mediates the relationships between goal attributes and moral justification. Further, moral justification also mediates the influence of mindfulness on unethical behavior. In the moderating role, mindfulness plays a significant impact on the positive relationships between peers’ unethical selling behavior and moral justification.

Data are collected from salespeople in Vietnam. Therefore, the results are limited.

While many organizations use goal-setting as a tool to promote employees’ performance, it is warned that goal variables (e.g. difficulty, specificity and performance pressure) may lead to unethical behavior. Interestingly, people may fail to notice moral dilemmas because of focusing on the goals. Furthermore, ethical erosion in organizations may spur unethical selling behavior. Therefore, salespeople sell unethically without intention to do so. Proposing mindfulness as self-regulation, these findings may explain the reasons people display unintentional unethical behavior. Therefore, it is crucial to set performance goals for employees not only to promote their performance but also to prevent unethical behaviors.

By focusing on the roles of mindfulness that foster unintended unethical practices, this study provides important implications for governments and policymakers. For example, governments may emphasize ethical codes to clearly definite which practices are unethical. Moreover, ethics training should be considered to enhance ethical cognition in people.

Emphasizing unintentional unethical selling behaviors in sales context, this study tests a research framework which highlights the roles of mindfulness in explaining the dark effects of performance goals on people’s cognition and behavior. Therefore, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of ethical blind spots in people’s cognition.

In addition to serving a hegemonic function, system-justifying ideologies serve the palliative function of enabling people to feel better about inequality. We summarize three studies supporting this proposition. In the first study, an arbitrary hierarchy was created using the “Star Power” simulation. Results reveal that system justification is associated with increased positive affect, satisfaction, and decreased negative affect, guilt, and frustration. Two additional studies demonstrate that the dampening effect of system justification on support for the redistribution of resources is mediated by reduced moral outrage but not guilt or negative affect. Implications for social change and social justice are discussed.

This article proposes a model for justifying decisions that integrates both ethical theory and practice. The usefulness of basic theory and applied practice in justifying decisions is a subject of continued debate. This article sees both as useful. It approaches moral justification from the perspective of responding to incentives. In this justification process, moral confrontation is the process of using theory to identify and analyze incentives and incentive conflicts. Moral imagination is a process of thinking that relies on practical intuition, self-reflection, and moral ideals to reconcile the identified incentives and incentive conflicts. Both theory and practice play vital and complementary roles in this moral justification process. The primary belief is that the proposed combination of moral confrontation and moral imagination can lead to advances in both the theory and practice of business ethics.

This focal chapter deals with the understanding of important ethical theories used in executive moral reasoning such as teleology, deontology, distributive justice and corrective justice, virtue ethics versus ethics of trust, from the perspectives of intrinsic versus instrumental good, moral worth versus moral obligation, and moral conscience versus moral justification. Ethical and moral reasoning will power executives to identify, explore, and resolve corporate moral dilemma, especially in the wake of emerging gray market areas where good and evil, right or wrong, just or unjust, and truth and falsehood cannot be easily distinguished. We focus on developing corporate skills of awareness of ethical values and moral imperatives in current otherwise highly commoditized and turbulent human, market, and corporate situations. The challenges of morality are multifaceted and diverse. Professionals usually have self-discipline and self-regulation abilities, ego strength, and social skills. Morality in the professions is not concerned with the issues of rudimentary socialization; rather, the issues involve deciding between conflicting values, where each value represents something good in itself. There are problems in both knowing what is right, good, true, and just on the one hand, and on the other hand, in doing what is right and avoiding wrong, doing good and avoiding evil, and being fair and just while avoiding being unfair and unjust. Several contemporary cases will illustrate the challenging dimensions of ethical and moral reasoning, moral judgment and moral justification embedded in executive decision processes, and corporate growth and profitability ventures.

The main purpose of this essay is to reflect on the nature of justification. To this end, the analysis draws on Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur ¹ [On Justification: Economies of Worth ² ]. More specifically, the article aims to examine the extent to which Boltanski and Thévenot’s conceptual framework, widely known as ‘the sociology of critical capacity’, ³ permits us to demonstrate that processes of justification ⁴ are vital to the symbolically mediated construction – that is, to both the conceptual and the empirical organization ⁵ – of social life. In order to prove the validity of this contention, the inquiry explores the meaning of ‘justification’ in relation to the following dimensions: (1) existence, (2) ethics, (3) justice, (4) perspective, (5) presuppositions, (6) agreement, (7) common worlds, (8) critique, (9) practice and (10) justification itself. By way of conclusion, the article maintains that processes of justification constitute an essential ingredient of human reality.

Scholars have begun calling for broader conceptualisations of moral disengagement processes that reflect the interaction of dispositional and situational antecedents to a predilection to morally disengage. The authors argue that collective leadership may be one such contingent antecedent. While researching leaders from the Gilded Age of American business history, the authors encountered a compelling historical case that facilitates theory elaboration within these intersecting domains. Interpreting evidence from the embittered leader dyad of Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, the authors show how leader egoism can permeate moral identity to promote symbolic moral self-regard and moral licensing, which augment a propensity to morally disengage. The authors use insights developed from our analysis to illustrate a process conceptualisation that reflects a dispositional and situational interaction as a precursor to moral disengagement and explains how collective leadership can function as a moral disengagement trigger/tool to reduce cognitive dissonance and support the cognitive, behavioural, and rhetorical processes utilised to justify unethical behaviour.

The constructs of relativism and absolutism have a significant role to play in the development of ethical theory; however, they are commonly simplified in their depictions and are philosophically more complex than we give them credit for. The purpose of this paper is to undertake an in‐depth examination of ethical relativity and ethical absolutism before concluding with a discussion of which research implications warrant further investigation.

A descriptive, historical, anthological approach has been taken.

Ethical relativism is regrettably subject to a proliferation of related terminology and, in many instances with different meanings ascribed to similar terms. In addition, ethical relativity appears to attract different research perspectives that are heavily dependent on their academic origins. A clear distinction needs to be made between ethical and situational relativity. It is suggested that relativism is present in the process of moral justification and that ethical relativism should be analyzed from three levels: the individual level, the role and group level, and the cultural levels. The over‐riding objection to ethical relativism rests on the consequences of accepting relativism, which undermines the existence and strength of global moral standards and the inherent positioning of ethical absolutism. Absolutism does not deny the existence of multiple moral practices evident around the world, but proposes that variations in ethical actions could still be rooted in common universal moral standards based on our requirements as human beings and the necessities of long‐term survival.

The ensuing discussions of relativism and absolutism open up a rich vein of research opportunities and suggest caution is required in regard to research methodologies. From a methodological perspective, care needs to be taken. For example, using hypothetical ethical dilemmas that are often unrelated to a specific industry or cultural setting has resulted in many researchers observing situational relativity rather than true ethical relativity.

This paper specifically examines whether there are differences in underlying and basic moral standards even though similarities in ethical behaviour have been determined, or whether differing ethical actions could, as the absolutists believe, originate from common universal standards despite apparent differences in perceptions and actions across cultures.