In the field of business ethics, “unethical behavior” by employees has received much attention. In the United States and Europe, empirical studies on clarifying the antecedents of unethical behavior began around 1970, and research is ongoing. In particular, Journal of Business Ethics has published five review articles every few years with the aim of contributing to the development of empirical unethical behavior research. However, in Japan, scarce empirical research on unethical behavior exists compared to other countries.
Therefore, this study seeks to clarify the trends and issues in empirical unethical behavior research in the United States and Europe from 1970 to 2020 to encourage empirical research on unethical behavior in Japan. First, we organize five review articles on 393 empirical studies from 1970 to 2011 (Section 2). Next, we review 60 empirical studies (including 206 hypothesis tests) on unethical behavior from 2012 to 2020, and then compare pre-2011 and post-2012 studies for each factor (Section 3). Finally, we provide an overview of the trends and issues of these empirical studies (Section 4).
We found that there were two trends: (1) transition from a “bad apples approach” to a “bad barrels approach,” and (2) developing original concepts in the business ethics field. Two issues emerged: (1) the need for verification of interaction or indirect effects, especially the combination of individual and organizational factors, or between organizational factors; and (2) the importance of examining the consistency between the validation results of empirical and theoretical research.
