Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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, Boon Heon Tan

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

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 …