Impact of employees’ perceived threat of market competition on unethical marketing and selling practices: Moral disengagement and ethical leadership

Abstract

This study draws on the social cognitive theory to examine the effect of perceived market competition on employees’ unethical marketing and selling practices. The boundary conditions associated with this relationship were examined, and we posit that perceived market competition is related to unethical marketing and selling practices through the mediating mechanism of moral disengagement. We further propose that ethical leadership moderates the relationship between the perceived threat of market competition, moral disengagement, and tendency toward unethical marketing and selling practices. We tested our hypotheses with a sample of 387 employees working in the banking sector in Pakistan. Our results suggest that moral disengagement had a full mediation effect between the perceived threat of market competition and tendency of employees toward unethical marketing and selling practices. Moreover, ethical leadership moderated the relationship between moral disengagement and the tendency of employees toward unethical marketing practices. The research findings indicate that when field employees encounter threat perceptions due to market competition, they have a propensity toward engaging in unethical marketing and selling practices when they can activate moral disengagement. This study also found that ethical leadership negatively moderates the relationship of moral disengagement with employees’ tendency toward unethical marketing and selling practices.

Ethical leadership and TMT decision-making of corporate social responsibility – a perspective of self-determination theory

“…Therefore, only ethical leaders who are deeply committed to ethical concepts such as "honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, and caring" can act proactively beyond conventional legitimacy and integrate CSR into the decision-making process without only considering short-term economic interests. On the other hand, ethical leaders communicate their ethical values by establishing clear expectations for ethical behavior (Cheng et al, 2022); promote ethical consistency throughout the organization by cultivating the ethical values of organizational members (Kim et al, 2023); and create an ethical culture within the organization, therefore, encourage organizational members to take responsibility for ethical decisions, consider the sustainability of ethical decisions, put the interests of the organization and society above personal interests, and pay much attention to long-term interests instead of short-term interests (Khan et al, 2021). To sum up, we propose the following hypothesis: H1: Ethical leadership has a positive effect on proactive CSR.…”

When morally good employees become bad: the role of unethical requests and wrong judgments at the workplace

“…De Cremer and Vandekerckhove, 2017;Jago and Pfeffer, 2019;Kuenzi et al, 2020;Umphress and Bingham, 2011). This literature has comprehensively investigated and recognized the role of several macro-level factors that lead to unethical practices in organizations, such as increased competitiveness and scarcity of resources (Kennedy, 2019;Khan et al, 2021). Similarly, an adequate body of literature in organizational behavior has focused on individual behavior and developed an understanding of the cognitive processes that encourage individuals to engage in unethical activities in organizations (Holtbrugge et al, 2015;Keem et al, 2018).…”

Nonlinear Diffusion Evolution Model of Unethical Behavior among Green Food Enterprise

“…However, most of the current articles on unethical behavior are from the perspective of organizational management, studying unethical behavior between leaders and employees [31][32][33]. For example, by integrating arguments from social identity and moral disengagement theories, Schuh et al [31].…”