Does moral commitment predict resistance to corruption? experimental evidence from a bribery game

Carmen Tanner,Stefan Linder,Matthias Sohn,Stefan T Trautmann

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0262201

Abstract

Corruption is ubiquitous in practice and has severe negative consequences for organizations and societies at large. Drawing on a laboratory experiment, we propose that individuals high in moral commitment are less likely to engage in corrupt behaviors and prefer foregoing financial benefits. Specifically, we posit that individuals refrain from corruption (i) the more they endorse integrity (incorruptibility) as a protected value and (ii) the higher their level of Honesty-Humility. The results of a two-step experiment largely support our expectations: people who treat compromises to integrity as unacceptable were less willing to accept bribes, and Honesty-Humility decreased bribe-giving. The findings are robust to demographic variables (e.g., age, gender, cultural background) and additional personal characteristics (e.g., risk tolerance, dispositional greed) and have important implications for ongoing theory-building efforts and business practice.

Highlights

Corruption, mainly understood as the abuse of entrusted power for personal benefit at the expense of others [1], is still experienced as a widespread and persistent problem causing harm at the economic, political, and social levels [2]
We focus on a participant’s decision to either engage in or abstain from corrupt behavior
The model shows that the more participants endorse PVRC, the less they accept bribes, whereas Honesty-Humility does not appear to be related to accepting bribes. These results suggest that the predictive strength of Honesty-Humility in the full sample is essentially based on the behavior of bribers, while the predictive strength of PVRC is based on the behavior of bribees

Summary

Introduction

Corruption, mainly understood as the abuse of entrusted power for personal benefit at the expense of others [1], is still experienced as a widespread and persistent problem causing harm at the economic, political, and social levels [2]. Research has mostly focused on macro-level antecedents of corruption, such as the role of economic, organizational, institutional, or cultural factors (e.g., [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]). These studies have greatly enhanced our understanding of aggregated differences in corruption between countries and companies.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion