Effect of a ubiquitous moral cue on ethical leadership, moral disengagement and goal difficulty: Real-world outcomes of a novel behavioural intervention by mobile application technology

• Main Author: TAN, Boon Heon
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
• Subjects: ethical infrastructure; ethical leadership; goal difficulty; moral disengagement; technology acceptance; ubiquitous cue; Infrastructure; Technology and Innovation
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/146; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1146&context=etd_coll
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Firms invest significant resources in their ethical infrastructure to influence the ethical decision-making of employees. The advent of mobile technology has extended the frontier of interventions that may discourage unethical behaviour, through the use of ubiquitously-present mobile-based moral cues. I conducted a prospective, randomized field experiment, to study how a ubiquitous moral cue may positively enhance ethical decision-making. Sales professionals working in a pharmaceutical firm in China were assigned randomly by teams to either receive, or not, a mobile application from their firm’s compliance department. Over six months, participants completed three cross-sectional surveys, and were randomly monitored by an independent external third party for non-compliant behaviour. The interactions of the mobile application with individual, team and firm factors that influence ethical decision-making were studied using ANOVA and regression methods to identify direct and indirect effects of the intervention. The results showed that a ubiquitous moral cue strengthened the negative relationship between ethical leadership and unethical behaviours. This result was demonstrated both by team self-reported unethical behaviours as well as third-party audit findings. Also, more third-party audit findings were found among participants reporting high difficulty in achieving their goals in the control arm, but not among those receiving a ubiquitous moral cue. Supplementary analyses also suggested that the greater the perceived ubiquity of the application, the lower the team self-reported unethical behavior, an outcome that supports the need to conduct further study of this new concept. However, contrary to expectation, a ubiquitous moral cue strengthened the effect of moral disengagement on team self-reported unethical behaviour. This study answers the call for more empirical research on the effectiveness of ethical and compliance infrastructure, and has immediate implications on the use of a ubiquitous moral cue as a behavioural intervention in practice.