Effects of ethical context on conflict and commitment among Chinese accountants

William E. Shafer · Zhihong Wang

34 citations0/0 files storedManagerial Auditing Journal

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Ethics in Business and Education Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior Accounting and Financial Management

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to addresses the impact of organizational ethical context (ethical climate and ethical culture) and Machiavellianism on organizational‐professional conflict (OPC) and affective organizational commitment (OC) among Chinese accountants. The paper also aims to test for interactive effects of ethical context and Machiavellianism. Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on a field survey of 89 professional accountants employed by companies operating in Mainland China. Findings Two aspects of the organizational ethical culture, expectations of obedience to authority and strong ethical norms/incentives, emerged as the dominant influences on both OPC and affective commitment. Strong negative correlations are observed between OPC and OC, and between Machiavellianism and OC. Contrary to expectations, the organizational ethical context had the greatest impact on OC among high Machiavellians. For low Machiavellians, OPC fully mediated the relationship between ethical context and OC, but no such mediation effects are found for high Machiavellians. Originality/value This is the first study of the relationships among ethical context, OPC and OC among industry accountants in China, and the first study of the effects of Machiavellianism on these relationships. The results generally support our contention that organizational ethical context will be a key determinant of OPC and OC. The fact that weaker ethical cultures were strongly associated with increased conflict and decreased commitment suggests that managers of accounting/auditing departments should take a proactive approach to developing and nurturing positive or supportive cultures. The differences in results for high and low Machiavellians also raise interesting questions that should be addressed in future research.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.

References

1991A three-component conceptualization of organizational commitment 1974Organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and turnover among psychiatric technicians.1996PERSON‐ORGANIZATION FIT: AN INTEGRATIVE REVIEW OF ITS CONCEPTUALIZATIONS, MEASUREMENT, AND IMPLICATIONS 1986Ethical Decision Making in Organizations: A Person-Situation Interactionist Model 1970Studies in Machiavellianism 1986A General Theory of Marketing Ethics 1988The Organizational Bases of Ethical Work Climates 1984Testing the "side-bet theory" of organizational commitment: Some methodological considerations.

Cited by

2016Does Ethical Culture in Audit Firms Support Auditor Objectivity?2011Antecedents of Organizational Commitment in a Chinese Construction Company 2015The Importance of Ethics and Ethical Leadership in the Accounting Profession 2015New insights into underreporting of time: the audit partner context 2017Exploring relationships among ethical climate types and organizational commitment

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.