Supervisor Bottom-Line Mentality, Instrumentalism Ethical Climate and Employee’s Unethical Behavior: The Moderate Effect of Moral Identity

Based on social information processing theory, this study proved that supervisor bottom-line mentality positively influenced unethical behavior through instrumentalism ethical climate. Also, the moderating role of moral identity was examined. The study selected 319 pairs of sample data. We explored the relationship between the supervisor bottom-line mentality and employees’ unethical behavior. The research results show that supervisor bottom-line mentality has a significant positive relationship with instrumentalism ethical climate (Hypothesis 1). Instrumentalism ethical climate-mediated the relationship between leadership bottom-line mentality and unethical behavior (Hypothesis 2). Moral identity moderated the relationship between instrumentalism ethical climate and unethical (Hypothesis 3). Keywords—Supervisor Bottom-line Mentality, Instrumentalism Ethical Climate, Unethical Behavior, Moral Identity Recently, a numerous business ethical scandals have been exposed. The major cause to this phenomenon is these companies pursue to maximize the profit and ignore commercial ethics. It leads to tarnishing their public image and credit crisis and slows down the development of those companies. Therefore, people have started paying attention to unethical behavior in organizations and it becomes a hot topic for the academic and practice fields. Consistent with previous research, we have defined unethical behavior as the behavior that violates the widely accepted ethical norms , such as falsifying bills, leaking company secrets, company assets, etc. . The unethical behaviors in the organization have an impact on employees' individual performance and internal trust relationship, and even pose a great threat to organizational performance, inter-organizational relationship and network . Therefore, it is of great significance to explore the generation mechanism of unethical behaviors and to prevent and control them. The study found that supervisors have an extremely important influence on employees' behaviors and attitudes . The supervisor’s attitude and behavior are the important antecedent variables for the study of employees' unethical behaviors, such as ethical leadership , transformational leadership , etc. China is in a rapid development stage, in order to respond to the fierce market competition, the supervisor often only one-sided emphasis on the business results which can bring profits for enterprise, while ignoring the other notable things [10] that is what we called Supervisor bottom-line mentality (BLM). At present, the concept of bottom line mentality has not been fully incorporated into the literature of organizational behavior, and it is not clear whether this attitude leads to the occurrence of bad behaviors , such as employees' unethical behavior. Therefore, it is necessary to explore how the supervisor BLM affects employees' unethical behavior. Based on the social information processing theory, supervisor is considered to be the symbol of power and status. It is an important source for employees to search for information , He has an important guiding role in the establishment of employees' work behavior and ethical standards, thus affecting the ethical climate in the organization. At the same time, the ethical climate tends to deal with organizational and personal moral issues in a subtle way. On the contrary, the negative ethical climate can easily cause employees’ unethical behaviors . However, from the point of view of individual moral characteristics, the different levels of employee moral identity have different ways of collecting and handling moral information in the organizational context. It shows that moral identity has a regulatory effect on employees' unethical behavior in a negative ethical climate. First of all, based on the considerations above, combining with the social information processing theory, this study examines the supervisor BLM has certain predicative functions to instrumentalism ethical climate , and the mediating role of instrumentalism ethical climate in the supervisor BLM and unethical behavior. Secondly, the study suggests that moral identity can moderate the relationship between the instrumentalism ethical climate and unethical behavior. On the one hand, this study starts from the perspective of cognitive psychology to illustrate how the supervisor BLM forms instrumentalism ethical climate, thereby affecting unethical behaviors, and to expand the theoretical framework of unethical behavior with a new way. On the other hand, this study explores the effective control and prevention programs, and also has important management implications for reducing unethical behaviors of organization and employees. 766 2018 2nd International Conference on Education, Economics and Management Research (ICEEMR 2018) Copyright © 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research (ASSEHR), volume 182