Much research has been done on the way in which individuals in organizations deal with their discretion. This article focuses on the literature on street-level bureaucracy and the literature on ethical decision-making. Despite their shared attempt to explain individual behaviour and decision-making, these research traditions have been developed quite independently. Moreover, while they both list relevant influencing factors, they do not succeed entirely in clarifying how and under which circumstances these factors have an impact on individual behaviour and decision-making. This article attempts to substantiate how the concept of 'social mechanism' could help to open the black box of causation.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing concern about the impact of New Public Management (NPM) reforms on public servants’ ethics. The academic literature about this topic is still characterized by considerable confusion and the article proposes a falsifiable theory as a way out of this. Specifically, it demonstrates that, when all the claims in the literature are translated into the proposed conceptual framework, they amount to an integrated set of propositions (that is, a theory) about the causal relationship between organizational processes (as changed by NPM‐reforms) and public servants’ ethics. Such an integrated theory is possible because, although the normative positions taken by the authors are clearly rival ones, their empirical claims are complementary. With the diverse claims thus integrated into one theory, the article provides a basis for empirical research and for the NPM‐ethics debate to proceed in a more explicit and systematic way.

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In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in unethical work behavior. Several types of survey-instruments to collect information about unethical work behavior are available. Nevertheless, to date little attention has been paid to design issues of those surveys. There are, however, several important problems that may influence reliability and validity of questionnaire data on the topic, such as social desirability bias. This paper addresses two important issues in the design of online surveys on unethical work behavior: the response scale for questions regarding the frequency of certain types of unethical work behavior and the location of the background questions in an online survey. We present the results of an analysis of a double split-ballot experiment in a large sample (n = 3386) on governmental integrity. We found that, when comparing response scales that have labels for all categories with response scales that only have anchors at the end, the latter provided answers with higher validity. The study did not provide support for the conventional practice of asking background questions at the end.