TEXAS A&M (US) — Corporate crime is not always driven by greed or ambition. Sometimes employees break the rules out of a desire to serve and protect the organization. A new study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, is one of the first to examine unethical behavior that benefits the corporation—called “unethical pro-organizational behavior,” or UPB—and how it may be tied to the degree of organizational identification the individual feels. The researchers define UPB as activity that is not specified by formal job descriptions; is either illegal or morally unacceptable to the larger community; and includes acts of commission (for example, cooking numbers to boost analyst projections and stock values) and omission (such as withholding information about the hazards of a pharmaceutical product).
