The Unintended Consequences of Social Accounting: Explanations and (Un)ethical Behavior

Abstract

In the organizational justice literature, social accounts or explanations have been found to be a useful mechanism in enhancing employees’ justice perception, particularly when organizational decisions may seem to be unfair or lacking procedural justice (Bies, 1987; Greenberg, 1987). Drawing on behavioral ethic literature, we extend the organizational justice literature by examining (un)ethical behavior as an outcome of generating explanations and moral disengagement and guilt as mediating mechanisms. We hypothesize that generating explanations will lead to moral disengagement and subsequently engage in unethical behavior. In addition, we hypothesize that different explanation types (i.e., justification and excuse) will have differential effects on moral disengagement, guilt, and unethical behavior. The results of our study show that compared with not generating explanations, participants were more likely to engage in unethical behavior following generating an explanation. In addition, generating excuses led to higher moral disengagement than generating justification.