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The purpose of this paper is to present an empirical study and contribute to the discussion of administrative ethics and integrity by investigating three ethical issues, namely trust, good governance and unethical actions in the Finnish public administration.

The evidence of this research is based on empirical data from a National Citizen Survey implemented in 2008 by the University of Vaasa. The questionnaire was sent to 5,000 Finnish citizens and the response rate was 40.4 percent.

The strength of the Finnish society concerning trust is that the citizens feel confident in public sector organizations and societal institutions. Even though serious corruption cases have remained few in Finland, there is still work to do in order to keep the situation under control. Ignorant and bad treatment of citizens occurs mostly in individual service encounters, it does not reflect the whole of the ethics of administration.

Further research is needed in order to investigate the societal background factors that can explain the different findings from the research questions. Also further research is required for comparing the results of different countries.

Strengths and weaknesses are identified as a tool for further research and for the work for practitioners.

The core contribution of the paper is a contribution to knowledge concerning citizens' perceptions of trust, good governance and unethical actions in an egalitarian society.

This chapter reviews ethical challenges confronting nonprofit administration in relation to organizational managerial practices and leadership behaviors. Through a theoretical model of nonprofit-specific toxic leadership, it reviews the dynamics of destructive leaders, susceptible followers, and conducive environments in cases of unethical and corrupt nonprofit organizational behaviors. It provides a case for prioritizing oversight responsibilities of the board of directors, board supervision, promoting ethical culture in organizational leadership, and implementing policies for addressing destructive and corrupt nonprofit leaders. It reflects on how nonprofit toxic leadership primarily erodes public trust in the nonprofit sector and concludes with practical recommendations for recentering positive behaviors congruent with the nonprofit's social and public good mission.

Unethical leadership represents one of the most serious obstacles to the development of organizations and societies. Although a range of empirical studies have investigated unethical leadership behaviour in different contexts, studies on this issue are almost non-existent within the Algerian context. This study aims to explore the role of social and organizational factors in shaping unethical leadership behaviour within Algerian public organizations.

A series of in-depth interviews were conducted with 15 leaders from public organizations. The collected data were analysed using a thematic approach with ATLAS.ti 8 software.

The reported social and organizational factors fall into five themes: social values, organizational culture, corruption, peer influence and political environment.

Given the grave consequences of unethical leadership behaviour, this study contributes to our understanding of the role of social and organizational factors in shaping unethical leadership behaviour in an understudied context. This can help in mitigating the factors that lay the ground for these destructive and unethical behaviours in public organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how accounting students view cheating actions inside and outside the classroom. It relates the love of money, a psychological variable, to the ethical perceptions of accounting students by examining their cheating perceptions.

A survey is developed based on cheating actions and the love of money scales and administered to 213 undergraduate and graduate accounting students in two universities in the western US students' perceptions of cheating are measured. Students are classified according to their love of money as money‐worshippers, money‐repellants, or careless money‐admirers.

Accounting students view cheating actions outside the classroom as more unethical than cheating actions inside the classroom. The love of money is significantly related to perceptions of cheating. Money worshippers view cheating actions as more ethical followed by money‐admirers and money‐repellants who view such actions as more unethical.

The surveyed students may not be representative of all students in the USA. In addition, perceptions of cheating may not determine cheating behavior.

Instructors should continue to emphasize the importance of ethical behavior. Future employers should consider the love of money as an important psychological variable related to ethical perception in their hiring decisions.

Previous research founds that classroom cheating can be used to predict future workplace cheating among accounting employees. The study is the first to examine the relationship between the love of money and cheating among accounting students.

This chapter develops a novel conceptualization of corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) and identifies possible avenues for further research in the international business (IB) and related fields.

A conceptual chapter examining the existing definitions of CSI and proposing a classification of irresponsible behaviours using an international law approach.

The concept of CSI has been weakly conceptualized and measured so far. We improve this by distinguishing between unethical conduct bearing no direct impact on human rights and those behaviours that do entail a human rights impact. Next, we classify human rights abuses in two categories based on whether they entail the violation of a derogable or a non-derogable human right. Finally, we make a distinction between direct and indirect irresponsible actions. These distinctions are also illustrated empirically.

This chapter bridges the gap between IB, management and international law research on human rights or else defined irresponsible behaviours. Our novel conceptualization of CSI can help to better address unanswered questions about factors driving CSI in IB firms.

To date, the vast majority of existing research on unethical leadership has focused on top leaders’ actions and behaviors as the primary catalyst for the permeation of unethical behaviors in organizations. In this chapter, we shift the focus to middle and junior managers and argue that they too have an active role in contributing to the permeation of top-level unethical leadership. More specifically, we adopt a meaning-making lens to investigate how junior and middle-level managers perceive and interpret top-level unethical leadership and how such meaning-making affects their (un)ethical legitimacy. Understanding the role played by lower-level managers becomes vitally important to develop a more holistic picture of the permeation of unethical leadership. Findings from 30 in-depth interviews with top, middle, and junior managers reveal variables such as survival, group membership, and strain as buttressing meaning-making by lower-level managers. Findings also revealed two contrasting aspects, that is, “interactions” within organizational members as well as “silence” by top-level managers playing into individuals’ information processing and attribution capacities during ethical dilemmas. Real cases experienced by participants pertaining to the flow of unethical leadership illustrate how the central bearings play out in managerial practice.

This study examines the salesperson-driven unethical behavior toward consumers in the retail banking context.

Consumer posts on an online social platform were analyzed using content analysis. Cluster analysis and word association analyses were conducted to analyze the posts across ethics dimensions, customer intentions and banking services.

Complaints about salesperson-driven unethical behavior were classified into three clusters: disrespect, fee deception and other deception. Four themes of consumer intentions emerged from data: expecting an action regarding the staff, fixing the problem, exiting the bank, or just expressing the problem on the social platform. There was a significant difference among clusters in terms of intentions. The deception clusters had a stronger association with fixing the problem, while the disrespect cluster had a stronger association with consumers’ willingness to express their complaints and requests regarding corrective actions for the salespeople.

Banks must differentiate their service recovery approach depending on the problem. While a refund can be more appropriate for recovering deception, a corrective action regarding misbehaving sales staff is expected by the customers for the disrespect problem.

This study contributed to the need for current research on personal selling practices and salesperson ethics in banking services. The unethical sales practices were linked to customer intentions, and several associations were found. An unethical sales behavior framework that can be used in future research was represented.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ability of enterprise systems and embedded controls to prevent unethical behavior within organizations.

The authors use a case study to explore how the configuration of information technology (IT) controls within enterprise systems and their effectiveness in preventing unethical behavior is compromised by the tone at the top.

The study highlights the decisive role of cultural values and leadership in moderating the relationship between IT controls and unethical behavior and the realization that ethical environments are socially constructed not enforced.

The limitation of this research is that the authors conducted one case study in an institution of higher education to refute the theory that IT controls embedded within enterprise systems can prevent unethical, and thus, the results may not be generalizable to other industries.

An important implication of the research is that the configuration of information system controls is affected by the organizational culture and the ethical values embraced by top management. When the tone at the top does not emphasize the ethical code of conduct, the configuration of IT controls will be compromised leaving organizations vulnerable at all levels.

Although the authors have a wealth of knowledge on ethics and theories that explain why unethical decision-making continue to surface to the headlines, they have little explanation as to why enterprise systems fail to stop unethical behavior in organizations. This study explores technical, organizational and individual factors that contribute to unethical decision-making.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of organizational ethical culture on the ethical decisions of tax practitioners in mainland China.

The study is based on a field survey of practicing public accountants.

As hypothesized, certain dimensions of ethical culture had highly significant effects on intentions to engage in aggressive tax minimization strategies. Cultures characterized by strong ethical norms and incentives for ethical behavior significantly reduced the reported likelihood of engaging in unethical behavior in a high moral intensity case. In a low moral intensity case, intentions to engage in questionable behavior were significantly higher when participants felt that top managers in their firm were unethical and rewarded unethical behavior. Relativism judgments (judgments of what is traditionally or culturally acceptable or acceptable to one's family) emerged as the strongest determinant of behavioral intentions across both cases. Participants also appeared highly sensitive to questions regarding what is traditionally or culturally acceptable in Chinese tax practice.

This is the first study of ethical decision making among tax practitioners in mainland China, and the findings add to a growing body of literature documenting the significant effects of organizational ethical context on public accountants' decision making processes. This has important implications for CPA firms, suggesting that proactive steps should be taken to promote supportive ethical contexts. The findings for the effects of relativism judgments raise concerns regarding the ethical decisions of Chinese tax practitioners, implying they are likely to engage in unethical behavior if they feel such behavior is common in their cultural environment.