Work, money and academic dishonesty: what feeds tolerance to informal practices in students? (University of Bucharest)
Presenters: Elena Druică and Rodica Ianole – Călin, University of Bucharest
Work, money and academic dishonesty: what feeds tolerance to informal practices in students?
The acknowledgement of increased degrees of dishonest behavior within organizations has lately become more and more prevalent in the media. The labels range from counterproductive work behaviors (Fox et al., 2001) to workplace crimes (Vadera & Pratt, 2013), with a large variability concerning typology, determinants and impact. The common thread lies in their generic detrimental effects: losses of billions of dollars and weaker levels of organizational performance (Dunlop & Lee, 2004; Cohen, 2018). Given the compelling negative consequences of workplace dishonesty, the task of identifying appropriate predictors that can be addressed through interventions at organizational level is of a great interest both for theoreticians and practitioners.Our research looks into long-term predispositions that may determine tolerance to various informal practices. To conceptualize informality we used two types of attitudes: how one agrees with actively bending different social rules, and how one tolerates, in a passive manner, behaviors involving piracy.
The importance of our research is threefold. Firstly, we pursue to examine whether a certain preoccupation with money can mediate the tolerance towards two expressions of informality. The approach mimics the experimental framework that illustrates the effects of money priming on pro-social behaviors (Vohs et al., 2006, Gąsiorowska & Hełka, 2012, Vohs, 2015), but employs data collected through a traditional survey. Secondly, we explore the relationship between inclination towards academic dishonesty and inclination to engage into informal behavior. This is supported by previous research showing that individuals with higher tolerance to bending rules have less ethical impediment to unethical behavior, even having a higher propensity to accept and be involved in such behavior (Lavalle et al., 2008; Cho and Kirwin, 2007). The manner in which the attitude toward work relates to one’s inclination to informality is the third dimension in our research.
We used PLS – PM analysis conducted in Warp PLS and R, to estimate contemporary relationships (Joreskog and Wold 1982) among our variables, and a sample of 504 respondents, age 18 – 25 (mean 19.82, sd = 1.55), students in various university centers across the country.
