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Organizations and society are concerned about unethical behavior. One type of unethical behavior is crimes of obedience, where followers are influenced by a leader to engage in behavior they would otherwise consider unethical. In this article, the author proposes that people who see themselves as leadership material and hold leaders in high esteem are more likely to view leaders as having more responsibility for ethical decisions and behaviors than followers. Consequently, such persons when placed in a follower position may be more susceptible to commit crimes of obedience through the process of moral disengagement by displacing responsibility for their behavior onto the leader.

The present study examined the relationship between a person's leadership beliefs and the propensity to justify his or her unethical behavior by shifting responsibility to those people in leadership positions who ordered or condoned the behavior. Theoretical support for this relationship comes from the moral disengagement branch of social cognitive theory, which proposes that one cognitive mechanism people employ to justify unethical behavior involves displacing responsibility for their action onto someone else (Bandura, 1999b). The study's results revealed that leadership self‐efficacy, affective and noncalculative motivation to lead, and shared orientation toward leadership were related to moral disengagement through the displacement of responsibility.

The objective of this paper is to study the direct and mediating effects on the motivation to become self-employed of a set of two individual factors (entrepreneurial self-efficacy and risk-taking) and five environmental factors (family self-employment background, social networks, social norms, legal system support and governmental support). Based on 535 cases from the United States, results show that legal system support, social networks, social norms, entrepreneurial self-efficacy and risk-taking had a strong impact on motivation for self-employment. Family self-employment history only had a direct effect and social networks and social norms only had an indirect effect on motivation for self-employment. Our study contributes to the literature by studying motivation for self-employment, at the "middle level" of complexity by providing a summary evaluation of a model involving 17 relationships among eight constructs. In so doing, we have also given substantial attention to context. Our results suggest the need to take into account individual and environmental factors systemically and contextually. Limitations and future research are discussed.

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