Reducing unethical behaviour : a structured literature review

Abstract

Unethical behaviour has attracted the interest of both scholars and practitioners since the 1960s when Rettig (1966) studied unethical behaviour. Over the years there has been growing consensus amongst scholars that unethical behaviour in the workplace is on the rise (Newman et al., 2020) and is detrimental for the business (Lin et al., 2018; Fleischman et al., 2019;Wang et al., 2022). It has become important to study unethical behaviour (Bonner et al., 2017; Jannat et al., 2022; Lin et al., 2018) with a view to reduce it. To address this gap, this structured literature review of 110 empirical studies has revealed that several interventions, which include establishing code of conduct (Lin et al.,2018; Jannat et al.,2022), ethical leadership (Young et al., 2021; Paterson & Huang, 2019), punishing transgressors (Kundro & Nurmohamed, 2021), monitoring (Belle & Cantareli, 2017), whistleblowing (Kaptein ,2022; Kenny et al., 2020) and CIMO logic (Denyer et al., 2008; Maesschalck, 2021)have been applied to reduce unethical behaviour in the workplace. It has also been established that establishing a code of conduct is the most widely applied intervention to reduce unethical behaviour with whistleblowing being the most widely researched intervention in the past five years. The study has identified that future studies could work on determining the most efficient intervention to reduce unethical behaviour particularly in the African context.