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Business students’ attitudes toward unethical behavior: A multi-country comparison

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Abstract

Business students are confronted early in their academic careers with examples of questionable acts and practices related to individual and corporate integrity. The current study identifies four segments of students with respect to their attitudes toward unethical behavior and is one of the first known attempts to understand country corruption and its impact on students of business. Findings from a worldwide survey of over 6,000 business students suggest that corruption does breed corruption and that business students in more corrupt countries have a greater likelihood than their counterparts in less corrupt countries to equate legal and ethical. It appears that business students in more corrupt countries expect to use the law as their ethical gauge in business decisions.

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Notes

  1. In order to make the independent variables orthogonal, the data was reduced by arranging for the sample size of each of the four cells to equal the row total sample size multiplied by the column total sample size, divided by the grand total sample size (see Table 3; e.g., Berger and Maurer 2002). This (random-sampling) paring process was replicated 15 times in order to confirm that the findings could be replicated and were not the result of how the data was pared. Indeed, the same pattern of results was replicated consistently. For reporting purposes, one pared data set was selected randomly and discussed.

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Acknowledgment

The authors would like to thank Scott Swain and Paul Berger for helpful comments on the methodology, as well as the anonymous reviewers and Joel Urbany for overall suggestions in making the research presentation much stronger. Partial funding for this research was provided by the IC2 Institute at The University of Texas at Austin.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carroll School of Management, Boston College, 140 Commonwealth Avenue, Chestnut Hill, MA, 02467, USA

    Victoria L. Crittenden

  2. College of Business Administration, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Richard C. Hanna

  3. Department of Marketing, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

    Robert A. Peterson

Authors
  1. Victoria L. Crittenden
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  2. Richard C. Hanna
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  3. Robert A. Peterson
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Correspondence to Victoria L. Crittenden.

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Crittenden, V.L., Hanna, R.C. & Peterson, R.A. Business students’ attitudes toward unethical behavior: A multi-country comparison. Mark Lett 20, 1–14 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-008-9051-4

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