Antecedents of Employees' Ethical Behavior in Pakistan: The Role of Personality Traits, Morality, and Organizational Support.

Abstract

Firms in a highly competitive environment, to improve productivity, put pressure on employees making them feel insecure about their job, prompting them to behave unethically to protect their jobs. Here employees’ ethicality crucially depends upon their personality traits, moral values, and well as organizational support. However, the bigger challenge is to know how these factors affect ethical behavior. For this, we propose a theoretical framework, thereby modifying Jino & Dyaram (2019) to include the big five personality traits. We hypothesize that Perceived organizational Support, internalized moral identity, as well as Personality traits (Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, and Openness to Experience), affect ownership of moral actions, and that sense of ownership, in turn, make employees behave ethically. Empirical validity was established by conducting a survey using a close-ended questionnaire. Data was collected from 360 employees working in the different organization of Karachi and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structured equation modeling. The results showed that perceived organization support and Conscientiousness, and Internalized Moral Identity have a positive and significant impact on both ethical behavior and moral ownership. Whereas Neuroticism negatively affected both. Moral Ownership also seems to have a positive effect on ethical behavior. Hence Moral Ownership positively mediates the impact of Conscientiousness, Internalized Moral Identity, and Perceived Organizational Support, on Ethical behavior, whereas negatively mediate Neuroticism and Ethical behavior relationship. Thus, this research will add to the literature on ethical conduct, worker development, and psychology.