No abstract

This article advances understanding of the antecedents and outcomes of moral disengagement by testing hypotheses with 3 waves of survey data from 307 business and education undergraduate students. The authors theorize that 6 individual differences will either increase or decrease moral disengagement, defined as a set of cognitive mechanisms that deactivate moral self-regulatory processes and thereby help to explain why individuals often make unethical decisions without apparent guilt or self-censure (Bandura, 1986). Results support 4 individual difference hypotheses, specifically, that empathy and moral identity are negatively related to moral disengagement, while trait cynicism and chance locus of control orientation are positively related to moral disengagement. Two additional locus of control orientations are not significantly related to moral disengagement. The authors also hypothesize and find that moral disengagement is positively related to unethical decision making. Finally, the authors hypothesize that moral disengagement plays a mediating role between the individual differences they studied and unethical decisions. Their results offer partial support for these mediating hypotheses. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for future research and for practice.

We examine the influence of individuals' propensity to morally disengage on a broad range of unethical organizational behaviors. First, we develop a parsimonious, adult-oriented, valid, and reliable measure of an individual's propensity to morally disengage, and demonstrate the relationship between it and a number of theoretically relevant constructs in its nomological network. Then, in 4 additional studies spanning laboratory and field settings, we demonstrate the power of the propensity to moral disengage to predict multiple types of unethical organizational behavior. In these studies we demonstrate that the propensity to morally disengage predicts several outcomes (self-reported unethical behavior, a decision to commit fraud, a self-serving decision in the workplace, and supervisor-and coworker-reported unethical work behaviors) beyond other established individual difference antecedents of unethical organizational behavior, as well as the most closely related extant measure of the construct. We conclude that scholars and practitioners seeking to understand a broad range of undesirable workplace behaviors can benefit from taking an individual's propensity to morally disengage into account. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.A host of ethical debacles across a wide range of contexts has inspired growing interest in studying and understanding why individuals engage in the kind of behavior that leads to enormous costs-trillions

No abstract

This research advances understanding of the psychological mechanisms that encourage or dissuade upward, improvement-oriented voice. The authors describe how the loyalty and exit concepts from A. O. Hirschman's (1970) seminal framework reflect an employee's psychological attachment to or detachment from the organization, respectively, and they argue that psychological attachment and detachment should not be considered as separate, alternative options to voice but rather as influences on voice behavior. Findings from 499 managers in the restaurant industry show that psychological detachment (measured as intention to leave) is significantly related to voice and mediates relationships between perceptions of leadership (leader-member exchange and abusive supervision) and voice, whereas psychological attachment (measured as affective commitment) is neither a direct predictor of voice nor a mediator of leadership-voice relationships.

No abstract

In this qualitative research, we enhance understanding of leader influences on employee voice perceptions by examining which leaders influence these perceptions and why these influences occur. We conducted 89 interviews in a high-tech multinational corporation with employees at multiple levels in two manufacturing and two R&D units that differed significantly on “speak up”-related items on a company-wide employee survey. Systematic analysis of the interview data led us to conclude that a broad spectrum of leaders from supervisors to senior managers influences individual employee voice perceptions in both direct and indirect ways. For example, informants referred to “skip-level leaders,” those leaders two to five levels above themselves, as reasons to view voice as risky or futile nearly as often as they referred to immediate bosses. We present evidence related to “how” and “why” these patterns of influence occur by reviewing the direct and indirect modes of influence identified and by outlining the managerial functions that provide occasions for skip-level leaders to have direct influences on employee voice perceptions. We also point to differences in the specific echelons of leadership that were most influential across the units studied. We propose that multilevel, multileader influences on voice perceptions result naturally from modern workflows, the essential functions performed by skip-level leaders, and deep-seated employee attitudes about authority in hierarchical organizations. We propose further that differences in which levels of skip-level leadership are most critical to employee voice perceptions in different units depend on which leaders have the power to handle strategic contingencies and to resolve key uncertainties within particular work environments. Finally, we delve into the theoretical implications of our findings to offer a set of research propositions that can be tested in future research. Collectively, our findings point to a complex and nuanced picture of multilevel leader influences on employee voice perceptions with important practical implications for management.

We present a synthesis of the general dimensions of organizational culture used most commonly in extant research and outline how these general dimensions correspond to the specific values and beliefs underlying total quality management (TQM) practice (a comprehensive change initiative). We argue that the relationship between culture and implementation of new behaviors and practices has not been adequately explored because of the lack of a comprehensive framework for defining and measuring organizational cultures. Our framework presents a necessary step in moving toward culture as a useful explanatory concept in organizational research.The one common denominator that led to failure in all of our previous quality efforts [prior to the mid 1980s] was that we did not change the culture or the environment in which all these tools and processes were being used. We had a "flavor of the month" mentality (Sam Malone, Worldwide Marketing Manager at Xerox Quality Solutions; quoted in Brennan, 1994: 36).