Acting on the behalf of future generations can require nontrivial sacrifice on the part of the present generation. Yet, people can gain important social psychological benefits from such acts, such as experiencing a connection to an entity that will presumably continue to exist in the social...

Evaluations play an important role in an organization's efforts to increase diversity. In this chapter we discuss two common evaluation biases – out-group discrimination and in-group favoritism – that are particularly relevant for concerns of increasing diversity. We examine the ethical...

In this chapter, we develop a model of envy and unethical decision making. We postulate that unfavorable comparisons will induce envy in outperformed coworkers, who are subsequently motivated to engage in unethical acts to harm the envied target. In particular, we consider the differential...

Researchers have proposed a variety of models to depict, explain, and understand ethical decision-making processes. Rest (1986) proposed a four-stage, individually oriented model, in which a person who makes a moral decision must (1) recognize the moral issue, (2) make a moral judgment, (3)...

We present a conceptual model of ethical behavior in groups and the role of group cohesion in enabling unethical behavior. We make the distinction between unethical actions that benefit an individual's work group, and actions that benefit the individual to develop a typology of unethical...

Virtual forms of organizing are increasing in today's organizations, with virtual teams being one of the most popular ways to bring distributed individuals together to work on tasks and make decisions. However, theory suggests that the factors that drive unethical behaviors in teams – such as...

Ethics initiatives are commonly used by organizations to influence members’ behavior with the expressed goal of aligning the behavior exhibited in the organization with the organization's stated rules and values ( Laufer & Robertson, 1997 ; Schwartz, 2002 ; Tenbrunsel, Smith-Crowe, & Umphress,...

A common way to promote cooperative and collectively beneficial behavior in organizations is to sanction self-interested and collectively harmful behavior. Social science researchers recently focus more and more on the negative effects of sanctions. In particular, it is argued that sanctioning...

A large amount of empirical literature has demonstrated that people will often choose outcomes close to equality, in games or disputes, rather than unequal outcomes that favor themselves. This behavior will henceforth be referred to as “fairness.” Various formulations of social utility...