Leadership, due to its power to influence, is one of the most important tools available to organisation in order to become competitive, and as such it is one of the recurring themes in social sciences. Today, new leadership strategies have emerged as new drivers of effectiveness in workplace relationships based on the leader–follower relationship. One of these leadership strategies is servant leadership, whose motto is ‘put and promote followers’ interests and needs first’, which makes this leadership style strongly linked to (...) exercising high ethics. As agapao love and service to others are important distinctive features of these leaders’ decisions and behaviours, the ethical influence relationship with their collaborators is thought to reach high levels. It is no surprise then that this ethical influence relationship makes followers to serve others and inculcates in followers values such as acceptance, tolerance, empathy, love, or forgiveness. More importantly, these leaders might make followers to grow in matureness, intelligence, creativity, and self-management, among other aspects. However, despite findings in recent literature of positive effects of servant leadership on valuable employee outcomes, research is still lacking on the results of this phenomenon on collective organisational variables and its influence in work groups. A case study analysis of a historic and emblematic hotel situated in a small Spanish city declared by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site provides evidence of the relationship between servant leadership and valuable work-group outcomes such as empowerment climate and group creativity. (shrink)

Management literature has repeatedly shown that an absence of voice can have serious negative influences on team and organization performance. However, employees often withhold suggestions or advices when they have ideas, concerns, or opinions. The present study proposes leader behavioral integrity as a key antecedent of employee voice, and investigates how and when leader behavioral integrity influences employee voice. Specifically, we argue that leader behavioral integrity affects employee voice via team independence climate. In addition, we propose a moderating effect of (...) corporate ethical values. The results from a study of 134 managers and 408 employees provide support for this moderated mediation model. Leader behavioral integrity positively affects employee voice via team independence climate, but only when ethical values are emphasized in organizations. These results suggest that leader behavioral integrity, along with team independence climate and corporate ethical values, is very important for fostering employee voice. (shrink)

The aim of the present longitudinal study was to quantitatively examine whether an ethical organizational culture predicts turnover among managers. To complement the quantitative results, a further important aim was to examine the self-reported reasons behind manager turnover, and the associations of ethical organizational culture with these reasons. The participants were Finnish managers working in technical and commercial fields. Logistic regression analyses indicated that, of the eight virtues investigated, congruency of supervisors, congruency of senior management, discussability, and sanctionability were negatively (...) related to manager turnover. The results also revealed that the turnover group is not homogeneous, and that there are several different reasons for leaving. The reasons given for turnover were grouped into five different categories: lay-off, career challenges, dissatisfaction with the job or organization, organizational change, and decreased well-being/motivation. ANCOVA analyses showed that those managers who stayed in their organization perceived their ethical culture to be stronger than those in turnover groups, and especially compared to groups 3 and 5. The results acquired through different methods complemented and confirmed each other, showing that by nurturing ethical virtues an organization can decrease job changes and encourage managers and supervisors to want to remain in their organization. (shrink)

Based on ideology-infused psychological contract theory and cognitive evaluation theory, this study investigated the curvilinear relationship between ethical leadership and employee creativity. A curvilinear mediation model was proposed to explain the impact of ethical leadership on creativity, using employee intrinsic motivation as the mediator. Applying a two wave sampling design that consist 258 employees and their leaders, we found that employee creativity improved as ethical leadership increased from low to moderate levels. However, the employee creativity improvement was attenuated when ethical (...) leadership increased from moderate to high levels. Furthermore, the study also revealed that employee intrinsic motivation partially mediated this curvilinear relationship. The theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. (shrink)

This study explored the relationship between the integrity of the supervisor and the manager and the creativity of employees who are below the supervisor. Drawing on social learning theory, we proposed a moderated mediation model for the trickle-down effects of perceived supervisor integrity. Using a sample of 716 employees and their supervisors, we found positive associations between both managers’ and supervisors’ integrity and employee creativity. Supervisors’ integrity partially mediates the relationship between managers’ integrity and employee creativity. In addition, supervisors’ perceptions (...) of professional ethical standards moderate the indirect effects of the managers’ integrity on employee creativity. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. (shrink)

This study examines the impact of various factors on ethical behavior of 507 employees working for three state-owned Chinese firms. Regulation of one’s emotions had a significant positive impact on ethical behavior of respondents. Organizational commitment also had a significant positive impact on ethical behavior of the respondents. Among various facets of job satisfaction, satisfaction with promotion, coworker, and supervision had a significant positive impact on ethical behavior of respondents. Among control variables, age of the employee had a significant negative (...) impact on ethical behavior, which indicated that the young employees showed a better ethical behavior than the old employees. (shrink)

This review summarizes the research on ethical decision-making from 2004 to 2011. Eighty-four articles were published during this period, resulting in 357 findings. Individual findings are categorized by their application to individual variables, organizational variables, or the concept of moral intensity as developed by Jones :366–395, 1991). Rest’s four-step model for ethical decision-making is used to summarize findings by dependent variable—awareness, intent, judgment, and behavior. A discussion of findings in each category is provided in order to uncover trends in the (...) ethical decision-making literature. A summary of areas of suggested future research is provided. (shrink)

We build on limited research concerning the mediation processes associated with the relationship between ethical culture and employee outcomes. A multidimensional measure of ethical culture was examined for its relationship to overall Person-Organization (P–O) fit and employee response, using a sample of 436 employees from social economy and commercial banks in Spain. In line with previous research involving unidimensional measures, ethical culture was found to relate positively to employee job satisfaction, affective commitment, and intention to stay. New to the literature, (...) ethical culture was also found to be associated positively with employee willingness to recommend the organization to others. These effects were observed even when perceptions of P–O fit were controlled. Importantly, ethical culture was also positively related to overall P–O fit, which in turn, partially mediated the relationship between ethical culture and employee outcomes. Our findings add to studies that focus on the importance of the degree of ethical congruence between the individual employee and the organization. They suggest that ethical culture, with its expected impact on virtuousness and emotional well-being, will positively influence outcomes independently of the degree to which there is a match between employee and organizational values. (shrink)

Business and Society Review, Volume 127, Issue 1, Page 69-96, Spring 2022.

This study examines factors impacting organizational commitment of 214 employees working at a Chinese state-owned steel company. Ethical behavior of peers and ethical behavior of successful managers had a significant impact on organizational commitment. The four facets of job satisfaction (pay, coworker, supervision, and work itself) had a significant impact on organizational commitment. Respondent’s age also significantly impacted organizational commitment. Perceptions of ethical behavior of successful managers, satisfaction with work, and gender were significantly correlated with social desirability bias.

Studies on the ethical culture of organizations have mainly focused on ethical culture at the organizational level. This study explores ethical culture at the team level because this can add a more detailed understanding of the ethics of an organization, which is necessary for more customized and effective management interventions. To find out whether various teams within an organization can have different ethical cultures, we employ the differentiation perspective and conduct a survey of 180 teams from one organization. The results (...) show that there are significant differences between the ethical cultures of teams. These differences are relevant given the different relationships that were established between high and low clusters of team ethical culture and two outcome variables. The results also show that the dimensions of ethical cultures among teams have different patterns, which indicates the usefulness of using a multidimensional scale for capturing further differences among team ethical cultures. (shrink)

In this study, we built and tested a theoretical model to determine how ethical leadership affects team creativity among teams composed of different characteristics. Following social learning theory and an antecedent–benefit–cost framework, we conducted analyses of multisource data from 50 team supervisors and 186 employees, which revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship between ethical leadership and team creativity. The teams exhibited more creativity when there was a moderate level of ethical leadership than when there were very low or very high levels. (...) Moreover, from an interactional perspective, we found that team faultlines significantly moderated the curvilinear relationship between ethical leadership and team creativity such that the inverted U-shaped relationship was more significant among teams with weak team faultlines. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Time theft is a costly burden on organizations. However, there is limited knowledge about why time theft occurs. To advance this line of research, this conceptual paper looks at the association between organizational injustice and time theft from identity, moral, and equity perspectives. This paper proposes that organizational injustice triggers time theft through decreased organizational identification. It also proposes that moral disengagement and equity sensitivity moderate this process such that organizational identification is less likely to mediate among employees with high (...) moral disengagement and more likely to mediate among employees who are equity sensitives and entitleds. (shrink)

Investigations into ethical judgments generally seem fuzzy as to the relevant research domain. We first attempted to clarify the construct and determine domain parameters. This attempt required addressing difficulties associated with pinpointing relevant literature, most notably the varied nomenclature used to refer to ethical judgments (individual evaluations of actions’ ethicality). Given this variation in construct nomenclature and the difficulties it presented in identifying pertinent focal studies, we elected to focus on research that cited papers featuring prominent and often-used measures of (...) ethical judgments (primarily, but not exclusively, the Multidimensional Ethics Scale). Our review of these studies indicated a preponderance of inferences and conclusions unwarranted by empirical evidence (likely attributable at least partly to inconsistent nomenclature). Moreover, ethical judgments related consistently to few respondent characteristics or any other variables, emergent relationships may not always be especially meaningful, and much research seems inclined to repetition of already verified findings. Although we concluded that knowledge about ethical judgments seems not to have advanced appreciably after decades of investigation, we suggested a possible path forward that focuses on the content of what is actually being judged as reflected in the myriad of vignettes used in the literature to elicit judgments. (shrink)

While previous literature provides evidence of the positive relationship between ethical climate and job satisfaction, the possible mechanisms of this relationship are still underexplored. This study aims to enhance scholars’ and practitioners’ understanding of the ethical climate–job satisfaction relationship by identifying and testing two of the possible mechanisms. More specifically, this study fills an existing research gap by examining social and interpersonal mechanisms, referred to in this study as workplace isolation of colleagues and salesperson’s teamwork, of the ethical climate–job satisfaction (...) relationship. This is vital for the selling profession because job satisfaction is known to drive higher levels of salespeople’s performance. The arguments for such mechanisms are built on the foundations of social/psychological contract theory and ethical climate literature. Empirical testing using a large sample of salespeople shows higher levels of ethical climate to decrease workplace isolation and increase teamwork. Findings support hypothesized model where ethical climate positively relates to job satisfaction as partially mediated by workplace isolation and teamwork. Ethical climate is negatively related to workplace isolation and positively to teamwork. Further, findings indicate negative effect of workplace isolation on teamwork and sales performance. Job satisfaction is found to be key factor in driving performance of salespeople. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of job attitudes on unethical behavior. Until now, job-related attitudes have been relatively ignored in the research area of ethical behavior and thus we suggest job dedication and organizational commitment as individual antecedents.Second, we examine the relationship between ethical climate and unethical behavior. Finally, this study explores the moderating effect of job relate burnout on the relationship of focal variables in this study.Job burnout was composed of two dimensions: disengagement and (...) exhaustion. Empirical study of this research used 204 employees’ questionnaires and hierarchical moderated regression analysis to test our hypotheses. Research findings are as follows. First, the results revealed that job dedication and organizational commitment had significantly negative impact on the unethical behavior. Therefore hypothesis 1and 2 were supported.Second, the negative relationship between ethical climate and unethical behavior was revealed statistically, and supported hypothesis 3.Third, according to the empirical results, job burnout partly moderated the relationship between focal variables of this study and unethical behavior. In particular, a higher level of disengagement decreases the negative impact of job dedication on unethical behavior, whereas a higher level of exhaustion decreases the negative effect of ethical climate on unethical behavior. Thus hypothesis 4 partially supported.Finally, we discussed some research implications and limitations of this study. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between organizational ethical context and the individual ethical decision-making process. In addition, a new statistical approach combining cluster and discriminant analyses was developed to overcome violations of regression assumptions, which are commonly not identified and/or ignored in behavioral and psychological research. Using regressions and this new alternative method, the findings indicated that ethical context does indeed influence the various components of ethical reasoning. However, social desirability was the strongest predictor of (...) ethical decision making, which raises new concerns about how this bias can confound business ethics research. Finally, the findings showed that the alternative method provided more useful and interpretive results, indicating that it has the capacity to influence future empirical work in the field of business ethics, particularly when dealing with data that do not satisfy regression assumptions. The implications and limitations of the study are discussed, and several noteworthy suggestions for future research are provided. (shrink)

The value of a company’s ethical reputation has become a focal point for management researchers. We seek to join this conversation and extend the research centered on a firm’s ethical reputation. We accomplish this by shifting our focus away from its impact on external stakeholders to its impact on internal stakeholders. To this end, we rely on signaling theory to explain why a firm’s ethical reputation matters to its employees in an effort to bridge the macro–micro research gap. Across two (...) studies, we propose and demonstrate that a firm’s ethical reputation impacts employee subjective career success in form of career opportunities and work–life balance. Given our signaling theory framework, we also identify and explain when two industry-level characteristics operate as boundary conditions that distort a firm’s ethical reputation signaling properties. Specifically, the results demonstrate that a firm’s ethical reputation is positively related to employees’ perceptions of career opportunities and work–life balance. The results of our studies also demonstrate that the relatively high levels of industry competition and industry regulation weaken the positive impact of a firm’s ethical reputation on career opportunities and work–life balance. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

The purpose of this research is to examine the notion of salesperson moral identity as a prosocial individual trait and its associated effects on customer and coworker relationships. In addition, this study examines the underlying processes in which these effects occur as well as the moderating role of internal competitive climate. Our empirical investigation of business-to-business (B2B) sales professionals reveals that moral identity has both direct and indirect effects on a salesperson’s customer- and team-directed outcomes. Specifically, our results demonstrate that (...) salesperson moral identity positively affects both salesperson-customer identification and organizational identification, which, in turn, impact customer service provision and teamwork. Our findings also indicate that internal competitive climate exacerbates the positive effects of salesperson moral identity on customer service provision and teamwork. (shrink)

The current two-sample investigation explores the role of enactment as a boundary condition in the relationship between experienced incivility and workplace outcomes. We integrate the tenets of the transactional model of stress and sensemaking theory to explain why enactment is a psychological sensemaking capability that can neutralize the adverse effects of experienced incivility on workplace outcomes. The results across two samples of data supported the study hypotheses by demonstrating that experienced incivility had stronger adverse effects on employees’ job satisfaction, OCBs, (...) and turnover intent for employees who reported lower levels of enactment than employees who reported higher levels of enactment. This study’s results make three important contributions to theory and research. First, we make an empirical contribution by examining enactment as a psychological sensemaking capability that can neutralize the adverse effects of experienced incivility on workplace outcomes. Second, we make a theoretical contribution by integrating the tenets of the transactional model of stress and sensemaking theory in a novel way that explains why enactment is a psychological sensemaking capability that can neutralize the adverse effects of stress on strain. Third, we demonstrate that enactment is the boundary condition that explains why incivility does not have universally adverse effects on employees’ outcomes. (shrink)

This paper explains how middle managers might enlist ethically engaged employees into the production of reliable, sustainable CSR. An accompanying model illustrates how those managers can encounter employee engagement in CSR and channel their enthusiasm effectively. It presents factors scaffolding organizational support for employee engagement and how they relate to the intensity of that engagement. It introduces the importance of employee voice and illustrates how associated signals might be captured.

This paper documents that business ethics has positive impacts upon the development of intellectual capital. Knowledge has become the most important asset of modern businesses, and this study argues that business ethics is associated with the development of intangible knowledge resources—intellectual capital. Businesses with ethical values at the core reinforce ethical conducts and successfully build trust with their various stakeholders, leading to the formation of an ethical and trustworthy corporate culture and a positive corporate environment. Thus, in this reasoning, an (...) ethical approach to business can encourage open communication, problems solving, knowledge sharing and creativity among employees to increase organisational capital; enhance interactions and relationships with suppliers, customers and other stakeholders to increase social capital; attract and retain good talent to increase human capital. Questionnaire survey is adopted as the research method with businesses in the electronic and information technology industries in Taiwan as sample. The results suggest that business ethics is associated with increased intellectual capital. Thus, this study demonstrates that the development of intellectual capital is in line with strengthened ethics. It contributes to the literature through combining research on business ethics with intellectual capital theories and extends the extant intellectual capital literature. (shrink)

Knowledge about ethical judgments has not advanced appreciably after decades of research. Such research, however, has rarely addressed the possible importance of the content of such judgments; that is, the material appearing in the brief vignettes or scenarios on which survey respondents base their evaluations. Indeed, this content has seemed an afterthought in most investigations. This paper closely examined the vast array of vignettes that have appeared in relevant research in an effort to reduce this proliferation to a more concise (...) set of overarching vignette themes. Six generic themes emerged from this process, labeled here as Dilemma, Classic, Conspiracy, Sophie’s Choice, Runaway Trolley, and Whistle Blowing. Each of these themes is characterized by a unique combination of four key factors that include the extent of protagonist personal benefit from relevant vignette activities and victim salience in vignette descriptions. Theme identification enabled inherent ambiguities in vignettes that threaten construct validity to come into sharp focus, provided clues regarding appropriate vignette construction, and may help to make sense of patterns of empirical findings that heretofore have seemed difficult to explain. (shrink)

This paper argues that consumer demand for unethical behavior such as fraud can impact employee turnover through market and psychological forces. Widespread conditions of unethical demand can improve career prospects for employees of unethical firms through higher income and stability associated with firm financial health. Similarly, unethical employees enjoy increased tenure from the financial and psychological rewards of prosocial behavior toward customers demanding corrupt or unethical behavior. We specifically examine the well-documented unethical demand for fraud in the vehicle emissions testing (...) industry, and its impact on employee tenure. We use data from tests conducted by several thousand licensed inspectors to demonstrate that fraudulent employees and employees of fraudulent firms enjoy longer tenure. These results suggest further work to separate the multiple psychological and economic mechanisms likely driving our findings. (shrink)

For four decades, research on the role and responsibilities of business in society has centered on the business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and an increasing number of studies on the corporate social performance (CSP)—corporate financial performance (CFP) link emerged leading to controversial results. Heeding the call for a deeper understanding of the mechanisms linking certain CSR efforts to certain performance outcomes, this study provides a stakeholder-based organizing framework rooted in an extensive review of existing literature on the link (...) between CSP and CFP. In so doing, we aim at guiding research and practice toward less simplistic understandings of the CSP–CFP connection, thus advancing the debate over the consequences of voluntary integrating CSR into business operations and into relationships with stakeholders. By disentangling specific drivers and outcomes of the CSP–CFP link, we underline the importance of setting clear boundaries and specifying levels of analysis to generate comparable results. (shrink)

“Would you like to contribute to XYZ charity by adding a dollar to your bill today?” Point-of-sale campaigns for fundraising are common to grocery stores, pharmacies, restaurants and warehouse clubs. Commonly referred to as ‘checkout charity,’ these fundraisers have generated over $4.1 billion in contributions for nonprofits over the past three decades. Yet little research has focused on the ethicality of this type of campaign. To address this need, we analyze the issue using behavioral ethics and normative theory. We consider (...) three stakeholder perspectives, including the nonprofit initiating the campaign, the business hosting the campaign, and the donor. Often ethical theories are seen as competing for primacy rather than being complementary perspectives in choosing the best action. We demonstrate that ethical discernment results in a richer analysis when consulting multiple frameworks. The purpose of this paper is to provide a set of ethical considerations for individuals to draw upon when devising and donating to checkout charity campaigns. This analysis will serve as a conceptual resource for scholars, practitioners, and students of nonprofit and for-profit management. (shrink)

Studies on the ethical culture of organizations have mainly focused on ethical culture at the organizational level. This study explores ethical culture at the team level because this can add a more detailed understanding of the ethics of an organization, which is necessary for more customized and effective management interventions. To find out whether various teams within an organization can have different ethical cultures, we employ the differentiation perspective and conduct a survey of 180 teams from one organization. The results (...) show that there are significant differences between the ethical cultures of teams. These differences are relevant given the different relationships that were established between high and low clusters of team ethical culture and two outcome variables. The results also show that the dimensions of ethical cultures among teams have different patterns, which indicates the usefulness of using a multidimensional scale for capturing further differences among team ethical cultures. (shrink)

A multidimensional measure of ethical culture was examined for its relationship to person–organization fit, ethical intent and organizational citizenship behavior, using a sample of 525 employees from the financial industry in Spain. As hypothesized, relative to studies using unidimensional assessments, our measure of EC was more strongly related to ethical intent and organizational citizenship. Also, significant differences were found in the degree to which each the EC dimensions related to both ethical intent and OCB. Finally, in a first for the (...) literature, we demonstrated the important role of overall P–O fit in connection with EC, ethical intent, and organizational citizenship. Specifically, as hypothesized, P–O fit moderated positively the association between EC and ethical intent, but mediated the EC–OCB relationship. (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)

This study examines the impact of various ethical climate types and job satisfaction on organizational commitment of 144 employees working at a Chinese private construction company. Both caring and independence climate types had a significant positive impact on organizational commitment. Instrumental climate had a significant negative impact on organizational commitment. Other climate types (professional, rules, and efficiency) had no significant impact on organizational commitment. Overall job satisfaction had a significant positive impact on organizational commitment. Overclaiming was significantly correlated with organizational (...) commitment, caring climate, rules climate, and job satisfaction. (shrink)

Ethical culture construction is beneficial to maximize policy following behavior and avoid accidents of coal miners in an economic downturn. This paper examines the congruence between coal mine ethical culture values and miners’ moral values and the relationship with PFB. To shed light on this relationship, supervisor moral values act as a key moderator. We build on the initial structure of values to measure ECVs, MVs, and SMVs. At the same time, available congruence was defined to describe the relationship between (...) the two values. Drawing upon a survey of 267 miners in Chinese large state-owned coal mining enterprises, results revealed that ECVs–MVs congruence had a linear relationship with intrinsic PFB and a non-linear relationship with extrinsic PFB. These findings demonstrate that SMVs had a moderating effect on the relationship between ECVs–MVs congruence and extrinsic PFB. Thus, we continued to calculate the available congruence scope in tested enterprises. Furthermore, this study gives relative management proposals and suggestions to improve miners’ moral standards and to reduce coal mine accidents. (shrink)

Extant research indicates a positive and significant relationship between corporate ethical values and employees’ job performance. Furthermore, past studies have empirically demonstrated that perceived fairness moderates the influence of corporate ethical values on employee performance. In other words, high congruity between employees’ and an organization’s ethical values will result in superior employee performance outcome. This research aims to develop a broader perspective on the complex relationship between CEV and employee outcomes. The article will first examine the direct influence of CEV (...) on organizational citizenship behaviors and alienation from work, and then the moderating role of perceived fairness. The researcher found a significant direct effect of CEV on both OCBs and AFW, but that perceived fairness does not moderate these relationships. A key implication of findings of this research is that although perception of fairness may suppress the impact of organizational ethical transgressions on employee performance in the short run, as earlier studies have demonstrated, but in the long term, implications of perceived fairness are multifold. (shrink)

The aims of this study were to investigate what kinds of personal work goals managers have and whether ethical organisational culture is related to these goals. The sample consisted of 811 Finnish managers from different organisations, in middle and upper management levels, aged 25–68 years. Eight work-related goal content categories were found based on the managers self-reported goals: (1) organisational goals (35.4 %), (2) competence goals (26.1 %), (3) well-being goals (12.1 %), (4) career-ending goals (7.3 %), (5) progression goals (...) (6.8 %), (6) prestige/influence goals (4.2 %), (7) job change goals (4.2 %) and (8) employment contract goals (3.9 %). Ethical organisational culture operated as a context for personal goal setting: Those managers who evaluated their organisational culture as more ethical were more likely to report organisational goals (e.g. goals toward the success or performance of the organisation). However, if managers gave lower ratings regarding ethical culture, then they named job change and career-ending goals in more cases. Therefore, investing into ethical virtues of the organisational culture can promote managers’ personal work goals, which also benefit the organisation. (shrink)

Following on theoretical work and studies that assert a relationship between unethical activities and diminished well-being, and a common belief that those more ethically inclined experience greater well-being, the present study examined whether individual differences in ethical orientation may be associated with the experience of well-being. This paper reports the findings of two separate studies showing that individual differences in moral attentiveness, moral identity, idealism, relativism, and integrity were associated with differences in a wide range of well-being measures. Of particular (...) significance is not all ethical orientations were found to contribute to well-being. In fact, some negatively impacted individual levels of well-being. Implications for integrating these new findings into existing ethical theory and considerations for future research are explored. (shrink)

The relationship between ethical ideology and job stress appears to be complex. This study is based on a model presented by Forsyth (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39:175, 1980), showing two dimensions (idealism and relativism) that play an important role in ethical evaluation and behavior. Based on a survey of 561 employees of hotel industry in India, ethical ideologies were found to be negatively associated with job stress. The data were analyzed using Pearson correlations and multiple regressions. The result (...) showed that relativism is negatively correlated with job stress. Further, it has been established that idealism and relativism interacted in such a way that there is a negative relationship between idealism and job stress when relativism is low and positive relationship when relativism is high. The findings imply that ethical ideology adversely influences the job stress in the organization. (shrink)