The Ethics of Care (EoC) theory has been widely applied in the field of management, and there is a growing consensus that it is important to recognise the value and practice of care in the workplace. In this paper, we consider the implications of the EoC at work, and in particular the risks...

This paper uses the IBE Ethics at Work 2018 survey to explore employees' ethical reasoning and examine gender and age differences across 12 countries. Debates about gender and ethics have been intense since Kohlberg's theory of moral development, with feminist critiques from Gilligan and others...

The increasing workplace use of artificially intelligent (AI) technologies has implications for the experience of meaningful human work. Meaningful work refers to the perception that one’s work has worth, significance, or a higher purpose. The development and organisational deployment of AI is...

In light of recent managerial oversights such as those connected with the Challenger space shuttle disaster, having executives rely more on their professionals might serve to improve their organization's ethical consciousness. Although the professional record on corporate ethical behavior is by...

We provide a new theory to explain why firms multitask workers rather than specializing them. Workers over-perform in tasks they like and under-perform in tasks they dislike, to favorably influence future job assignments. Anticipating this, firms may find it optimal to commit to future...

We experimentally investigate the relationship between unethical behaviors through misreporting choices in the workplace and the perceived social inappropriateness of these unethical decisions. We conducted a norm-elicitation experiment in which we considered two unethical actions as observed in...

The literature on meaningful work often highlights the role of leaders in creating a sense of meaning in the work or tasks that their staff or followers carry out. However, a fundamental question arises about whether or not leaders are morally responsible for providing meaningful work when...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate the concept of vicarious moral cleansing and scrutinize whether unethical behavior of leaders initiate moral cleansing in subordinates or not. This study also highlights a boundary condition under which employees are motivated to cleanse their...

Employment contracts are often incomplete, leaving many responsibilities subject to workers’ discretion. High work morale is therefore essential for sustaining voluntary cooperation and high productivity in firms. We conducted a field experiment to test whether workers reciprocate wage cuts...

The main purpose of this study was to examine the ethicality of future employees' attitudes toward advancement in the workplace in Slovenia and Lithuania. This study focuses on students representing young adults from Generation Z as future employees in organizations. Using a survey of...

This research aimed to analyze the moderating effect that Protestant work ethics (PWE) have on the relationship between human resources practices (HRP) and (a) work engagement (WE) and (b) organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). The sample consisted of 299 participants. The results revealed...

We experimentally test norm-behavior consistency by investigating the relationship between unethical behaviors in the workplace through financial reporting choices and the perceived social inappropriateness of unethical decisions. We conducted a norm-elicitation experiment in which we considered...

Der neue Ethikkodex des Vereins für Socialpolitik nimmt Stellung gegen die Diskriminierung von Frauen und Minderheiten, sexuelle und anderweitige Belästigung im Arbeitsumfeld sowie das Schaffen eines feindseligen Umfelds. Neuere Untersuchungen zeigen, dass eine Gleichberechtigung von Frauen...

Employment may be important to well-being for reasons beyond its role as an income source. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value of employment in refugee camps in Bangladesh. The study involves 745 individuals in a field experiment with three arms: a control arm, a...

Sifarish is an act of achieving goals based on network connectivity, this kind of participatory relationship in administrative activities is evident in many parts of the world; guanxi in China, yongo in Korea, blat in Russia, and wasta in the Arab World are some of the items on display. This...

Arguably the fundamental problem faced by employers is how to elicit effort from employees. Most models suggest that employers meet this challenge by monitoring employees carefully to prevent shirking. But there is another option that relies on heterogeneity across employees, and that is to...

Firms in a highly competitive environment, to improve productivity, put pressure on employees making them feel insecure about their job, prompting them to behave unethically to protect their jobs. Here employees’ ethicality crucially depends upon their personality traits, moral values, and...

Ethical leadership (EL) seems to be effective in reducing workplace deviance, questions remain as to whether its benefits are consistent across all situations. Specifically, whether its effectiveness remained in an already ethical environment. In this investigation, we explore two important...

That individuals contribute in social dilemma interactions even when contributing is costly is a well-established observation in the experimental literature. Since a contributor is always strictly worse off than a non-contributor the question is raised if an intrinsic motivation to contribute...

Civil servants have a bad reputation of being lazy. However, citizens' personal experiences with civil servants appear to be significantly better. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive contracts...

The paper analyses the interaction between economic incentives and work norms in the context of social insurance. If the work norm is endogenous in the sense that it is weaker when the population share of beneficiaries is higher, then voters will choose less generous benefits than otherwise. We...

Children who can count on support from altruistic parents may not try hard to succeed in the labor market. Moreover, parental altruism makes withdrawal of such support non-credible. To promote work effort, parents may want to instill norms which later cause their children to experience guilt or...

Social norms are usually neglected in economics, because they are to a large extent enforced through non-market interactions and difficult to isolate empirically. In this paper, we offer a direct measure of the social norm to work and we show that this norm has important economic effects. The...

This paper studies the interaction between labor market integration, the evolution of "work values" and entrepreneurial capital inside minority communities. A simple model of labor market segmentation with ethnic capital and endogenous transmission of cultural values inside the minority group is...

This paper provides a model of “social hysteresis,” whereby long, deep recessions demotivate workers and thereby lead them to change their work ethic. In switching from a pro-work to an anti-work identity, their incentives to seek and retain work fall and consequently their employment...

Many European countries still provide their citizens with social insurance programs of unprecedented generosity. A cultural critique of the welfare state contends that generous social insurance has detrimental effects on work norms. This paper revisits the model of endogenous work ethic...

In the rural areas of developing countries, teacher absence is a widespread problem. This paper tests whether a simple incentive program based on teacher presence can reduce teacher absence, and whether it has the potential to lead to more teaching activities and better learning. In 60 informal...

The majority of todays workforce demands work to be meaningful and not solely a paycheck. Realizing this demand may be the key to positive and lasting outcomes including higher motivation, improved performance, and lower absenteeism. These outcomes surpass those of common extrinsic incentives....

In settings where an individual's labor choices are constrained, the inability to work may generate psychosocial harm. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value of employment in the Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh. We engage 745 individuals in a field experiment with...

Neid, Völlerei, Habgier, Wollust, Hochmut, Trägheit und Zorn - die sogenannten sieben Todsünden sind weitgehend bekannt und noch weiter verbreitet. Sie beschreiben sieben Motive und Verhaltensweisen, die viele Menschen im Alltag begleiten, aber zugleich als Vergehen moralisch gebrandmarkt...

This agent-based model contributes to a theory of corporate culture in which company performance and employees’ behaviour result from the interaction between financial incentives, motivational factors and endogenous social norms. Employees’ personal values are the main drivers of behaviour....

This research focuses on the role of gender and physical attractiveness in judging severity of unethical workplace behavior. Scenarios with possible ethical dilemmas (commonly referred to as "gray areas" of behavior) were displayed to 4,483 subjects. Our findings show that "gray area" behavior...