The Impact Of Individual’s Social Characteristics On Unethical Behavior

Unethical behavior was widely regarded as an important facet to organizational development and reputation. However, little study empirically identified the impact of individual social characteristics on unethical behavior. With the development of unethical behavior study, more and more scholars concerned the integrated effects of individual’s social characteristics. In this study, we tested the influence of altruism, reciprocity, ingratiation and needs for face on individual unethical behavior.Based on the path model of the research, we conducted to explore the social psychological mechanism of unethical behavior from the perspective of individual social characteristics. The data was obtained from240management students through questionnaire survey. The unethical scale, the altruism scale, the ingratiation scale, the needs for face scale and the reciprocity scale were adopted. We used SPSS20.0and AMOS21.0to analyze collected data and conduct structural equation modelling.In the first stage of data analysis, we tested the hypotheses on the relationship between altruism and unethical behavior, the result showed that altruism and needs for moral face has a significant negative impact on unethical behavior. It suggested the positive individual social characteristics have a negative relationship with unethical behavior. Then we tested the relationship between the negative social characteristics and unethical behavior. Results showed that the negative individual social characteristics have a positive relationship with unethical behavior. In the third stage of data analysis, we tested the positive reciprocity and negative reciprocity as the medium variable between the individual social characteristics and unethical behavior. Result also supported the mediating role of reciprocity on the relationship between individual social characteristics and unethical behavior. The present study contributes to our understanding of the relationship between the individual social characteristics and unethical behavior. The theoretical implication of this research is that it presents a new perspective of investigating the impact of individual social characteristics on unethical behavior. In addition, using the structural equation modeling, the research investigated the causal relationship between altruism, reciprocity, ingratiation, needs for face, individual unethical behavior, and the mediating effects of reciprocity. Finally, the results supported the mediating effects of positive reciprocity between moral face need, ingratiation and unethical behavior, also the mediating effects of negative reciprocity between social face need, altruism and unethical behavior.Research result demonstrated that:altruism and needs for moral face had significant negative impact on unethical behavior; ingratiation and needs for social face had significant positive effects on the unethical behavior; altruism and needs for moral face would positively affect positive reciprocity; ingratiation and needs for social face had significant positive impact on negative reciprocity; the negative relationship between ingratiation and positive reciprocity, altruism and negative reciprocity were also significant. Results supported the mediating role of reciprocity on the relationship between individual social characteristics and unethical behavior. The implications for future study were also discussed.