Ethical attitudes and ethical behavior in organizations may have substantial ramifications on a firm’s operation. This study investigates whether or not managers are perceived by employees to exhibit ethical attitudes and ethical behavior and thereby being their role models. A sample of 111 employees within the finance department of a major municipality who are exposed to unethical behavior responded to a structured questionnaire concerning ethical and unethical episodes. There were three major findings: first, consistently perceived ethical behavior is lower than perceived ethical attitudes of the employee, his peers and of his managers; second, self‐enhancing bias exists; and third, managers do not exhibit an ethical role model in the organization. Implications for human resource management and policies are discussed.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.