Social norms on unethical behaviors in the workplace: A lab experiment

International Review of Economics, volume 72, issue 1, 2025[10.1007/s12232-024-00479-2]

57 Pages Posted: 3 Jul 2023 Last revised: 2 Dec 2024

See all articles by Alice Guerra

Alice Guerra

University of Bologna - Department of Economics

Enya Turrini

Royal Holloway, University of London

Abstract

We analyze social norms on unethical behaviors in the workplace using a laboratory experiment. We conducted a norm-elicitation experiment in which we considered two unethical actions as observed in an earlier behavior experiment by Amore et al. (J Bus Ethics 183:495–510, 2023): leaders’ and workers’ untruthful reporting, and workers’ misalignment with their leader’s truthful reporting. We presented participants with Amore et al.’s (2023) background: in experimental firms (1 leader and 3 workers), each member can report their performance via automatic or self-reporting, where the latter allows for profitable and undetectable earnings manipulation. Using the Krupka–Weber procedure, we asked participants to assess the social appropriateness of the reporting decisions that the subjects in Amore et al. (2023) could have taken. We find prevailing norms against self-reporting for artificial profit inflation, and workers’ self-reporting when the leader used automatic reporting. Yet, despite these norms, many subjects in the previous experiment engaged in such unethical misreporting for personal gain. These findings reveal a disconnection between the prevailing social norms and the observed unethical behaviors.

Keywords: Ethical norms, Business ethics, Misreporting, Social norms, Norm-behavior consistency, Gender stereotypes, Krupka-Weber method

Suggested Citation

Guerra, Alice and Turrini, Enya,

Social norms on unethical behaviors in the workplace: A lab experiment

. International Review of Economics, volume 72, issue 1, 2025[10.1007/s12232-024-00479-2], Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4498969 or http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12232-024-00479-2

Alice Guerra (Contact Author)

University of Bologna - Department of Economics ( email )

Bologna
Italy

Enya Turrini

Royal Holloway, University of London ( email )

Egham hill
Egham, TW20 0EX
United Kingdom

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