DEVELOPING A MEASURE OF UNETHICAL BEHAVIOR IN THE WORKPLACE: A STAKEHOLDER PERSPECTIVE

INTRODUCTIONThis article presents empirical support for understanding the ethics of business in terms of unethical behaviors toward various stakeholders. This article uses stakeholder theory as a conceptual basis to develop a broader and multidimensional measure of unethical behavior in eight consecutive steps.

STEP 1: ITEM GENERATIONTo generate an initial set of items, business code of ethics were used as input.The 200 largest companies in the world, 105 companies had a business code of ethics. Theses business codes of ethics collected were all analyzed independently by two researchers, resulting in 86 different behavioral items.Those items that are addressed in 10% or less of the business codes of ethics were eliminated. In total, 35 items were dropped.

For the present study the remaining 51 items were reformulated by the author in negative terms as unethical.In reformulating the items into one or sometimes two negative items, the challenge was to keep the descriptions relatively generic and applicable across organizations, occupations, sectors, and nations.For example, discrimination against employees could be subdivided into discrimination based on gender, age, nationality, race, ethnic background, creed, religion, disabilities, and marital or parental status.The result was 53 items of unethical behavior.

STEP 2: ITEM REVIEWThe remaining list of items was presented to 6 other business ethics scholars, 8 ethics officers, 11 business ethics consultants, and 20 business students to review it for redundancies and unclear formulations.The review led to 41, some slightly rephrased, itemsHowever, four items were combined to create 2 new items. This resulted in a list of 39 items of unethical behavior.

STEP 3: EXPLORATORY FACTOR ANALYSISData were collected on a diverse sample of the Dutch working population.A panel of 750 members of the Dutch working population was invited to complete a Web-based questionnaire.400 usable questionnaires were returned, achieving a response rate of 53.3 percentOf the respondents, 52% were male and 13.3% held the position of manager. Their average age was 41 years.An exploratory factor analysis with an oblique rotation was implemented.Evaluation of the eigenvalues greater than 1.0 suggested six factors. Based on parallel analysis relative to random eigenvalues a steep break in the eigenvalues plot between the fifth factor (1.89) and sixth factor (1.01), however, indicated a five-factor solution.

Each of the five factors centered on a single stakeholder group. Items of the combine factors were primarily related to the ethical responsibilities to a single group of the company that are;Factor 1 toward financiers, Factor 2 toward customers, Factor 3 toward employees, Factor 4 toward suppliers,Factor 5 toward society.

As shown in Table 2, the correlations between the five factors were moderate (r ranged between .20 and .50, p < .01). This indicates that the types of unethical behavior are distinct but related.