Most companies use codes of conduct, ethical training and regular communication to assure employees know about rules to follow to avoid misconduct. This paper focuses on the type of language used in codes of conduct, and shows that impersonal language (“employees/members”) and personal,...

In this paper, I rely on recent literature on moral licensing and consequences of the amoral, rational, and impersonal and emotionally detached approaches to ethical decision-making to develop and empirically test the theoretical argument that professional self-conceptions lead individuals to...

Previous research on unethical behavior in organizations suggests that employees who engage in such behavior are motivated by the desire to advance their own self-interest, often acting selfishly at the expense of their own organizations. However, such behaviors also may be motivated by...

Ethics research developed partly in response to calls from organizations to understand and solve unethical behavior. Departing from prior work that has mainly focused on examining the antecedents and consequences of dishonesty, we examine two approaches to mitigating unethical behavior: (1)...