Social norms on unethical behaviors in the workplace: a lab experiment

Alice Guerra () and Enya Turrini ()
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Alice Guerra: University of Bologna
Enya Turrini: Royal Holloway University of London

International Review of Economics, 2025, vol. 72, issue 1, No 3, 25 pages

Abstract: Abstract We analyze social norms on unethical behaviors in the workplace using a laboratory experiment. We conducted a norm-elicitation experiment in which we considered two unethical actions as observed in an earlier behavior experiment by Amore et al. (J Bus Ethics 183:495–510, 2023): leaders’ and workers’ untruthful reporting, and workers’ misalignment with their leader’s truthful reporting. We presented participants with Amore et al.’s (2023) background: in experimental firms (1 leader and 3 workers), each member can report their performance via automatic or self-reporting, where the latter allows for profitable and undetectable earnings manipulation. Using the Krupka–Weber procedure, we asked participants to assess the social appropriateness of the reporting decisions that the subjects in Amore et al. (2023) could have taken. We find prevailing norms against self-reporting for artificial profit inflation, and workers’ self-reporting when the leader used automatic reporting. Yet, despite these norms, many subjects in the previous experiment engaged in such unethical misreporting for personal gain. These findings reveal a disconnection between the prevailing social norms and the observed unethical behaviors.

Keywords: Ethical norms; Business ethics; Misreporting; Social norms; Norm-behavior consistency; Gender stereotypes; Krupka-Weber method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 C92 D01 D20 J16 M14 M41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1007/s12232-024-00479-2

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