Psych Research

Many researchers in the past have tried to determine why people make unethical decisions in the workplace. This has become a more popular field of study with the increase of unethical scandals in the workplace. Although the number of scandals has increased, not a lot is known about why people make unethical choices in the workplace. The purpose of "Bad Apples, Bad Cases, and Bad Barrels: Meta-Analytic Evidence About Sources of Unethical Decisions at Work" is to provide insight into what influences unethical behavior at work.

According to Rest's four stage model of ethical decision making, people pass through a few different stages when trying to make either an ethical or unethical decision. First is ones moral intention; what they intent on doing. Next is ones moral action; what one actually does. This article is about the workplace and there are two aspects that deal with this; workplace deviance and illegal behavior. Workplace deviance is simply violating organizational norms. In the workplace someone's workplace deviance may not violate accepted social norms. On the other hand, some unethical behaviors overlap with illegal behavior. These are obvious things such as assault, sexual harassment, ect. There are three main hypotheses in this experiment. First, unethical decisions at work are causes by "a few unsavory individuals" (Trevino & Youngblood, 1990, p. 378). Second, how do aspects of an ethical dilemma provoke or prevent unethical choices. Lastly, how do unethical choices reflect the characteristics of one's general organizational environment? All of these questions are discussed and explored in this article.

Cognitive moral development had been tested and developed for 20 years in developmental psychology. This theory explains how people advance from childhood to adulthood in their thinking of moral or non-moral actions. Most adults' judgments' about what they think are right are influenced by peers and other people or by policies and rules such as laws. People with a low level of cognitive moral development often act selfish with their own self interests in mind. On the other hand, someone who is capable of reasoning about an ethical issue is uncomfortable because of the cognitive tension that is created. This proves that the first hypothesis that cognitive moral development is negatively related to unethical choices.

Ethical climate, or organizational work climate, was introduced to measure shared employee beliefs that arise when people that ethical reasoning is the norm for decision making in a workplace. An employee's perception of ethical climate can be mapped into two different areas. Ethical criteria which includes egoism, benevolence and principled is one. The next is locus of analysis, including individual, local, and cosmopolitan. By combining these dimensions, it is proposed that there are nine types of ethical climates. Ethical climate represents