Corruption devours profits, people, and the planet. Ethical leaders promote ethical behaviors. We develop a first-stage moderated mediation theoretical model, explore the intricate relationships between ethical leadership and employee ethical behaviors, and treat ethical climate and organizational justice as dual mediators and leaders’ moral attentiveness as a moderator. We investigate leadership from two perspectives—leaders’ self-evaluation of moral attentiveness and members’ perceptions of ethical leadership. We theorize: These dual mediation mechanisms are more robust for high moral leaders than low moral leaders. (...) Our three-wave data collected from multiple sources, 236 members and 98 immediate supervisors in the Republic of Iraq, support our theory. Specifically, ethical leadership robustly impacts organizational justice’s intensity and magnitude, leading to high employee ethical behaviors when leaders’ moral attentiveness is high than low. However, ethical leadership only influences the ethical climate’s intensity but has no impact on the magnitude when leaders’ moral attentiveness is high than low. Therefore, organizational justice is a more robust mediator than the ethical climate in the omnibus context of leader moral attentiveness. Our findings support Western theory and constructs, demonstrating a new theory for Muslims in Arabic’s emerging markets. Individual decision-makers apply their values as a lens to frame their concerns in the immediate and omnibus contexts to maximize their expected utility and ultimate serenity-happiness. Ethical leadership trickles down to employee ethical behaviors, providing practical implications for improving the ethical environment, corporate social responsibility, leader-member exchange, business ethics, and economic potentials in the global competitive markets. (shrink)

Monetary intelligence theory asserts that individuals apply their money attitude to frame critical concerns in the context and strategically select certain options to achieve financial goals and ultimate happiness. This study explores the dark side of monetary Intelligence and behavioral economics—dishonesty. Dishonesty, a risky prospect, involves cost–benefit analysis of self-interest. We frame good or bad barrels in the environmental context as a proxy of high or low probability of getting caught for dishonesty, respectively. We theorize: The magnitude and intensity of (...) the relationship between love of money and dishonest prospect may reveal how individuals frame dishonesty in the context of two levels of subjective norm—perceived corporate ethical values at the micro-level and Corruption Perceptions Index at the macro-level, collected from multiple sources. Based on 6382 managers in 31 geopolitical entities across six continents, our cross-level three-way interaction effect illustrates: As expected, managers in good barrels, mixed barrels, and bad barrels display low, medium, and high magnitude of dishonesty, respectively. With high CEV, the intensity is the same across cultures. With low CEV, the intensity of dishonesty is the highest in high CPI entities —the Enron Effect, but the lowest in low CPI entities. CPI has a strong impact on the magnitude of dishonesty, whereas CEV has a strong impact on the intensity of dishonesty. We demonstrate dishonesty in light of monetary values and two frames of social norm, revealing critical implications to the field of behavioral economics and business ethics. (shrink)

Monetary Intelligence theory asserts that individuals apply their money attitude to frame critical concerns in the context and strategically select certain options to achieve financial goals and ultimate happiness. This study explores the bright side of Monetary Intelligence and behavioral economics, frames money attitude in the context of pay and life satisfaction, and controls money at the macro-level and micro-level. We theorize: Managers with low love of money motive but high stewardship behavior will have high subjective well-being: pay satisfaction and (...) quality of life. Data collected from 6586 managers in 32 cultures across six continents support our theory. Interestingly, GDP per capita is related to life satisfaction, but not to pay satisfaction. Individual income is related to both life and pay satisfaction. Neither GDP nor income is related to Happiness. Our theoretical model across three GDP groups offers new discoveries: In high GDP entities, “high income” not only reduces aspirations—“Rich, Motivator, and Power,” but also promotes stewardship behavior—“Budget, Give/Donate, and Contribute” and appreciation of “Achievement.” After controlling income, we demonstrate the bright side of Monetary Intelligence: Low love of money motive but high stewardship behavior define Monetary Intelligence. “Good apples enjoy good quality of life in good barrels.” This notion adds another explanation to managers’ low magnitude of dishonesty in entities with high Corruption Perceptions Index. In low GDP entities, high income is related to poor Budgeting skills and escalated Happiness. These managers experience equal satisfaction with pay and life. We add a new vocabulary to the conversation of monetary intelligence, income, GDP, happiness, subjective well-being, good and bad apples and barrels, corruption, and behavioral ethics. (shrink)

Research suggests that organizational justice has important impacts on work-related attitudes and behaviors, such as organizational citizenship behavior. In this article, we explore the extent to which individualism moderates the relationship between organizational justice and OCB among citizens in Kyrgyzstan. We make additional contributions to the literature because we know very little about these constructs in this former Soviet Union country, Kyrgyzstan, an under-researched and under-represented region of the world. Results of our data collected from 402 managers and employees in (...) Kyrgyzstan offer the following new discoveries. All three justice constructs are related to OCB. Individualism moderates only the distributive and interactive justice to OCB relationships. We develop an intricate theory with provocative implications: Procedural justice produces obedience. For “individualists,” interactional justice inspires loyalty and, interestingly, distributive justice “can only buy” participation, but “can’t buy” loyalty. Therefore, for individualists, interactional justice outweighs distributive justice for organizational loyalty. Based on Kyrgyz citizens’ justice, OCB, and individualism, our theory reveals novel insights regarding culture, money attitude, and intrinsic motivation and provides critical and practical implications to the field of business ethics. (shrink)

Robert King Merton’s article published in Science popularized the Matthew Effect: “For to everyone who has, more will be given and he will grow rich; but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away”. The Matthew Effect prevails at the individual, organization-industry, and country-global levels. This interdisciplinary review connects the Holy Bible with agency theory, tournament theory, corporate social responsibility, prospect theory, behavioral economics, the psychology of money, and business ethics in the literature. I (...) expand the Matthew Effect, incorporate prospect theory and the love of money, and develop a multi-level theory of the Matthew Effect in Monetary Wisdoms: Individual decision-makers apply their deep-rooted values as a lens, frame the critical concerns in the immediate and omnibus contexts, and maximize expected utility and ultimate serenity-happiness across people, context, and time at the individual, organization-industry, and country-global levels. The rich serve God, enjoying the ultimate joy and happiness. The poor serve mammon, destroying their lives. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. Scholars of business ethics and CSR must explore this phenomenon in future studies. (shrink)

We investigate the extent to which perceptions of the authenticity of supervisor’s personal integrity and character (ASPIRE) moderate the relationship between people’s love of money (LOM) and propensity to engage in unethical behavior (PUB) among 266 part-time employees who were also business students in a five-wave panel study. We found that a high level of ASPIRE perceptions was related to high love-of-money orientation, high self-esteem, but low unethical behavior intention (PUB). Unethical behavior intention (PUB) was significantly correlated with their high (...) Machiavellianism, low self-esteem, and low intrinsic religiosity. Our counterintuitive results revealed that the main effect of LOM on PUB was not significant, but the main effect of ASPIRE on PUB was significant. Further, the significant interaction effect between LOM and ASPIRE on unethical behavior intention provided profoundly interesting findings: High LOM was related to high unethical behavior intention for people with low ASPIRE, but was related to low unethical intention for those with high ASPIRE. People with high LOM and low ASPIRE had the highest unethical behavior intention; whereas those with high LOM and high ASPIRE had the lowest. We discuss results in light of individual differences, ethical environment, and perceived demand characteristics. (shrink)

This research investigates the efficacy of business ethics intervention, tests a theoretical model that the love of money is directly or indirectly related to propensity to engage in unethical behavior (PUB), and treats college major (business vs. psychology) and gender (male vs. female) as moderators in multi-group analyses. Results suggested that business students who received business ethics intervention significantly changed their conceptions of unethical behavior and reduced their propensity to engage in theft; while psychology students without intervention had no such (...) changes. Therefore, ethics training had some impacts on business students' learning and education (intelligence). For our theoretical model, results of the whole sample (N = 298) revealed that Machiavellianism (measured at Time 1) was a mediator of the relationship between the love of money (measured at Time 1) and unethical behavior (measured at Time 2) (the Love of Money → Machiavellianism → Unethical Behavior). Further, this mediating effect existed for business students (n = 198) but not for psychology students (n = 100), for male students (n = 165) but not for female students (n = 133), and for male business students (n = 128) but not for female business students (n = 70). Moreover, when examined alone, the direct effect (the Love of Money → Unethical Behavior) existed for business students but not for psychology students. We concluded that a short business ethics intervention may have no impact on the issue of virtue (wisdom). (shrink)

This study examines a model involving income, the love of money, pay satisfaction, organizational commitment, job changes, and unethical behavior among 211 full-time employees in Hong Kong, China. Direct paths suggested that the love of money was related to unethical behavior, but income (money) was not. Indirect paths showed that income was negatively related to the love of money that, in turn, was negatively related to pay satisfaction that, in turn, was negatively associated with unethical behavior. Pay satisfaction was positively (...) related to organizational commitment. Thus, the love of money is the root of evil, but money is not. (shrink)

This study explores the dark side of leadership, treats creative self-efficacy as a mediator, and frames supervisor bullying and employee creativity in the context of social cognition and social comparison. We theorize that with a high social comparison orientation, the combination of high supervisory abuse toward themselves (own abusive supervision) and low supervisory abuse toward other team members (peer abusive supervision) leads to a double whammy effect: When employees are “singled out” for abuse, these victims suffer from not only low (...) creative self-efficacy due to supervisory abuse but also low supervisory creativity ratings. Results based on our two-wave data collected from multiple sources—253 employees and their 77 immediate supervisors—support our theory. The significant three-way interaction effect reveals that when social comparison orientation is high and peer abusive supervision is low (Time 1), own abusive supervision (Time 1) creates the strongest negative impact on creative self-efficacy (Time 2), which is significantly related to supervisory low creativity rating (Time 2). Our discoveries of egregious bullying offer provocative theoretical, empirical, and practical implications to the fields of leadership, abusive supervision, creativity, and business ethics. (shrink)

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners, are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the (...) origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process–content distinction. (shrink)

China has achieved economic prominence but damaged the natural environment. Can religions excite pro-environmental actions? Chinese religion encompasses Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, native Taoism, and indigenous folk beliefs (GuanDi and Mazu). We theorize that believers demonstrate more sustainable HOPE (Help Ourselves Protect the Environment) than non-believers. Religions with standardized and formal liturgy show more pro-environmental HOPE than those without it. We challenge the myth that the believers of Christianity and Islam display more sustainable HOPE than other faith. The 2013 Chinese General (...) Social Survey (involving 10,017 randomly selected participants across 28 provinces) revealed that 11.10% of them have faith. Believers display higher levels of HOPE than atheists, demonstrating the __religion__ effect. Among believers, native Taoism and Buddhism exhibit more ecological HOPE than other religions, supporting the __dogma__ effect in the Chinese culture. Religions with formalized liturgy demonstrate more pro-environmental HOPE than generalized folk beliefs—GuanDi and Mazu, validating the __liturgy__ effect. Females, married, and people with good income, education, health, and country-domicile—the haves—exhibit robust ecological HOPE. The rich get richer and greener. However, those who are older, males, urban residents, and the Han majority do not. We empirically demonstrate the Matthew Effect in Religious Social Responsibility: Religious faith facilitates believers’ pro-environmental behaviors—HOPE and ethical behaviors in China. (shrink)

In this study, we develop a theoretical model of monetary intelligence (MI), explore the extent to which individuals’ meaning of money is related to the pursuit of materialistic purposes, and test our model using the whole sample and across college major and gender. We select the 15-item love of money (LOM) construct—Factors Good, Evil (Affective), Budget (Behavioral), Achievement, and Power (Cognitive)—from the Money Ethic Scale and Factors Success and Centrality and two indicators—from the Materialism Scale. Based on our data collected (...) from 330 university students in Czech Republic, we provide the following findings. First, our formative models are superior to our reflective models. Second, for the reflective model, money represents Power, Good, Achievement, and not Evil, in the context of materialism. Our formative model suggests that those who pursuit materialism cherish Achievement (vanity) but Budget their money poorly. Third, multi-group analyses illustrate that humanities students (62.4 % female) consider money as Evil and Budget their money poorly, while those in natural sciences (37.6 % female) do not. Further, men are obsessed with Achievement, whereas women do not Budget their money properly, suggesting reflective temptation for males and impulsive temptation for females. Our novel discoveries shed new lights on the relationships between LOM and materialism and offer practical implications to the field of consumer behavior and business ethics. (shrink)

Why are people interested in money? Specifically, what could be the biological basis for the extraordinary incentive and reinforcing power of money, which seems to be unique to the human species? We identify two ways in which a commodity which is of no biological significance in itself can become a strong motivator. The first is if it is used as a tool, and by a metaphorical extension this is often applied to money: it is used instrumentally, in order to obtain (...) biologically relevant incentives. Second, substances can be strong motivators because they imitate the action of natural incentives but do not produce the fitness gains for which those incentives are instinctively sought. The classic examples of this process are psychoactive drugs, but we argue that the drug concept can also be extended metaphorically to provide an account of money motivation. From a review of theoretical and empirical literature about money, we conclude that (i) there are a number of phenomena that cannot be accounted for by a pure Tool Theory of money motivation; (ii) supplementing Tool Theory with a Drug Theory enables the anomalous phenomena to be explained; and (iii) the human instincts that, according to a Drug Theory, money parasitizes include trading (derived from reciprocal altruism) and object play. (Published Online April 5 2006) Key Words: economic behaviour; evolutionary psychology; giving; incentive; money; motivation; play; reciprocal altruism. (shrink)

In this article, drawing from a relational perspective, we explore the relationship between moral leadership and employee creativity, treat employee identification with leader and leader–member exchange as two mediators, and develop a new theoretical model of employee creativity. Our data collected from 160 supervisor–subordinate dyads in the People’s Republic of China demonstrate that moral leadership is positively related to both employee identification with leader and LMX. Further, employee identification with leader partially mediates the relationship between moral leadership and LMX. In (...) particular, employee identification with leader greatly enhances LMX which leads to high creativity. Overall, the relationship between moral leadership and employee creativity is mediated by not only employee identification with leader but also LMX. Our findings offer a new theoretical framework for future theory development and testing on creativity as well as practical implications for researchers and managers in business ethics. (shrink)

Mindfulness—the awareness of the present moment and experiences in daily life—contributes to genuine intrinsic and social-oriented values and curbs materialistic and hedonistic values. In the context of materialism, money is power. Avaricious individuals take risks and are likely to engage in dishonesty. Very little research has investigated the effects of mindfulness in reducing the avaricious monetary attitudes and enhancing ethical consumer beliefs. In this study, we theorize that mindfulness improves consumer ethics directly and indirectly by lowering avaricious monetary attitudes. To (...) test our theory, we collected data from 523 individuals with the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction training and 307 individuals without MBSR. The results of our whole sample support our theory. Three multiple-group confirmatory factor analyses reveal intriguing discoveries. First, with MBSR training, mindfulness excites consumer ethical beliefs directly and indirectly. Without training, trait mindfulness fails to reduce monetary attitudes—mindfulness training matters. Second, the power of MBSR training holds for participants completing the training within 1 year, but wears off after 1 year—the duration after training matters. Finally, after 1 year, the training retains its strength for those who practice mindfulness, but weakens its power for those who do not—practice matters. We shed light on mindfulness, monetary wisdom, and consumer ethics, in particular, and business ethics, in general. (shrink)

Adolescents have increasing discretionary income, expenditures, and purchasing power. Inventory shrinkage costs $123.4 billion globally to retail outlets. Adolescents are disproportionately responsible for theft and shoplifting. Both parents and peers significantly influence adolescents’ monetary values, materialism, and dishonesty as consumers. In this study, we develop a theoretical model involving teenagers’ social attachment and their consumer ethics, treat adolescents’ money attitude in the context of youth materialism as a mediator, and simultaneously examine the direct and indirect paths. Results of 1018 adolescents (...) illustrate that social attachment discourages unethical beliefs directly, but encourages it indirectly through monetary values. Our multi-group analyses demonstrate a novel paradox: The correlation between parental and peer attachments is smaller in France than in China, but similar across gender. Parents contribute more than peers to social attachment in France, but both carry equal weight in China. There is a negative direct path for the Chinese sample and for girls. Indirectly, parental attachment prevents French teenagers’ unethical beliefs, whereas peer attachment promotes boys’ unethical intention, supporting the notion—bad company corrupts good morals. Across both culture and gender, monetary attitude excites dishonesty consistently for all adolescents. A negative direct path exists for Chinese boys only. Overall, social attachment reduces unethical beliefs. Parental and peer supports shape teenagers’ monetary intelligence and ethical or unethical decision making, differently, across culture and gender. We provide theoretical, empirical, and practical implications to ethical parenting, peer attachment, monetary values, and business ethics. (shrink)