IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/sek/iacpro/6508342.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Judging Ethical Behavior in the Workplace: The Role of Attractiveness and Gender

Author

Listed:
  • Zeev Shtudiner

    (Ariel University)

Abstract

One of the most challenging areas for employees and managers is dealing with shades of gray related to ethical behaviors. The ability to evaluate unethical behavior can differ from person to person and is vulnerable to the influences of unrelated attributions. In the current study, we investigated the role of physical attractiveness and gender in judging severity of unethical workplace behavior. Scenarios with unethical behavioral dilemmas were displayed to 4,602 subjects in different versions accompanied with images. Our findings show that "gray area" behavior was evaluated with more severity if conducted by a plain-looking employee than an attractive one. When comparing genders, the same action was perceived as more ethical if performed by male employees. We explore a number of explanations for this discrimination based on the psychological literature.

Suggested Citation

  • Zeev Shtudiner, 2018. "Judging Ethical Behavior in the Workplace: The Role of Attractiveness and Gender," Proceedings of International Academic Conferences 6508342, International Institute of Social and Economic Sciences.
    • Handle: RePEc:sek:iacpro:6508342
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://iises.net/proceedings/40th-international-academic-conference-stockholm/table-of-content/detail?cid=65&iid=056&rid=8342
    File Function: First version, 2018
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    business ethics; experiment; gender; beauty;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • M10 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Business Administration - - - General

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sek:iacpro:6508342. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Klara Cermakova (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://iises.net/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.