In this study, we used the framework of institutional anomie theory The future of anomie theory, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1997) to examine the relationship between supervisors’ ethics and their personal value orientation, including achievement and pecuniary materialism. We further investigated whether these individual-level associations were moderated by societal factors consisting of income inequality, government efficiency, foreign competition, and technological advancement. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to analyze data of 16,464 supervisors from 42 nations obtained from the 2010–2014 wave of (...) the World Values Survey. Results showed that strong achievement value orientation was positively related to willingness to justify ethically suspect behaviors; government efficiency and technological advancement, respectively, had negative and positive moderating effects on this relationship. On the other hand, foreign competition had a positive moderating effect on the association between pecuniary materialism and ethicality. (shrink)

Ethics are of interest to business scholars because they influence decisions, behaviors, and outcomes. While scholars have increasingly shown interest in business ethics as a research topic, there are a mounting number of studies that examine ethical issues at the organizational level of analysis. This manuscript reports the results of a systematic review of empirical research on organizational ethics published in a broad sample of business journals over a 33-year period. A total of 184 articles are analyzed to reveal gaps (...) in the literature and, subsequently, lead to suggestions for future research; this is done in an effort to stimulate and perpetuate high quality research that more broadly impacts business scholars and practitioners. (shrink)

This study examined the direct influence of national economic condition, as well as the indirect effects through the strength of noneconomic institutions on supervisors’ ethical reasoning using the institutional anomie theory developed by Messner and Rosenfeld :1393–1416, 2001). Utilizing data of 20,025 supervisors across 52 countries, the analyses showed that high disparity in the economic distribution directly and indirectly leads to unethical values. High economic inequality in a country resulted in high tendency of supervisors to justify unethical acts. In addition, (...) some of this influence went through the institutional strength of family, education, polity, and religion, thereby indicating partial mediation. As a result, the study presented the important roles of social institutions in explaining supervisors’ attitude and behavior. The findings of this research contribute to the institutional anomie theory by clarifying the multilevel path of the macrostructures’ conditions in explaining supervisors’ ethicality. Moreover, since some of the relationships between variables resulted in the direction opposite to the propositions of the theory, this study suggested other theoretical models that may be integrated with IAT. Along with these theoretical contributions, practical implications to businesses and society are discussed to strengthen supervisors’ ethics. (shrink)

The literature on organizational ethicality to date has focused primarily on elements of the cultural, social, and political factors that enhance positive behaviors, interspersed with isolated accounts of malfeasance and wrongdoing. This treatise defines the anatomy of organizational dysfunction as a matter of ethicality, reframing the relationship from individual transgression to the organization itself. It is argued that the structure of an organization predisposes in large part whether it is itself conducive or prohibitive to unethical acts. Our approach allows for (...) a new stream of ethics research whose focus is how an organization functions rather than on the specific acts of those within it. (shrink)