UNC Kenan-Flagler Assistant Professor Tim Kundro fields questions concerning how managers and firms can best foster a healthy working environment.
UNC-Chapel Hill Professor Kurt Gray discusses how research can help us understand – and navigate – our rapidly changing professional and social lives.
Leaders play a critical role in creating the ethics agenda in organizations. Their communications, decisions, and behaviors influence employees to act ethically or unethically to accomplish organizational goals. To be sure, various reviews within the behavioral ethics literature have highlighted the crucial role that ethical leadership plays in gearing organizations and employees ethically. Yet, numerous documented ethical failings in organizations have evidenced the impact of unethical leadership—where leaders’ unethical conduct or influence on employees promotes unethicality within organizations and generates harmful consequences.
Perceived integrity of managers affects employee attitudes. Yet its impact on employee behavior and organizational performance is unknown. Addressing this gap, we examine the effect of perceived integrity in leadership on both subjective firm performance and objective employee productivity.
Previous research has used an ego depletion perspective to establish a self-regulatory model linking sleep deprivation to unethical behavior via depletion (Barnes, Schaubroeck, Huth, & Ghumman, 2011; Christian & Ellis, 2011; Welsh, Ellis, Christian, & Mai, 2014). We extend this research by moving beyond depletion to examine a more nuanced, process-based view of self-control.
Firms should disclose information on material cyber-attacks. However, because managers have incentives to withhold negative information, and investors cannot discover most cyber-attacks independently, firms may underreport them. Using data on cyber-attacks that firms voluntarily disclosed, and those that were withheld and later discovered by sources outside the firm, we estimate the extent to which firms withhold information on cyber-attacks.
Crowdsourcing contests (also called innovation challenges, innovation contests, and inducement prize contests) can be used to solicit multisectoral feedback on health programs and design public health campaigns. They consist of organizing a steering committee, soliciting contributions, engaging the community, judging contributions, recognizing a subset of contributors, and sharing with the community.
We investigate the effect of CFO narcissism, as measured by signature size, on financial reporting quality. Experimentally, we validate that narcissism predicts misreporting behavior, and that signature size predicts misreporting through its association with narcissism.
This paper investigates whether by exposing superiors to moral symbols, subordinates can discourage their superiors from asking them to perform unethical acts.
We investigate the role of mindfulness as a regulatory factor by examining whether it mitigates the relationship between justice and retaliation. Drawing on theories of self-regulation, we integrate work on justice with emerging frameworks that identify mindfulness as an important work-related regulatory variable (Glomb, Duffy, Bono, & Yang, 2011).
The current paper examines how asking for a report of units of work completed versus cost of the same work can influence overbilling. We suggest that something as simple as asking for a report of units of work completed (for instance, reporting either the time spent or number of units of work completed) as opposed to the cost of the work completed can drive different unethical behaviors.
How Destructive Work Behaviors Can Cripple a Company
Unethical behavior deeply embedded within an organization can affect employee morale and impact bigger issues, such as performance, turnover, and healthcare and legal costs.