THE WHO, WHEN, AND WHERE OF UNETHICAL CHOICES: A META-ANALYSIS JENNIFER KISH GEPHART Pennsylvania State University, University Park 405a Business Building University Park, PA 16802 DAVID A. HARRISON Pennsylvania State University, University Park LINDA KLEBE TREVINO Pennsylvania State University, University Park INTRODUCTION For many of its early years, a scholarly approach to business ethics was considered the province of philosophers -- a normative pursuit that existed to guide “appropriate” individual behavior (Treviño & Weaver, 1994). Today, however, there is little question about the scientific legitimacy of investigating business ethics. Researchers and practitioners alike are increasingly interested in doing business the “right way. That is, how is an organization able to reduce the incidence of unethical behavior? Who makes unethical decisions most often? When and where are people most likely to engage in unethical behavior? Unfortunately, despite increased concern by multiple stakeholders and increasing sophistication of business ethics research (i.e., O’Fallon & Butterfield, 2005; Treviño et al., 2006), we do not yet have a cumulative, authoritative, evidence-based understanding of what causes (un)ethical choices in organizational settings. In this paper, we use meta-analysis to lay the foundation of such an understanding. By bringing together empirical research on ethical decision making from multiple resources and disparate literatures, we provide a clearer picture of the individual, situational, and environmental factors that impact individual-level unethical choices. Following Rest’s (1986) four component model of ethical decision making, we focus on the antecedents of unethical intention and unethical behavior, specifically. The latter can be defined as willful action that harms another entity (such as employees, stakeholders, or the organization) and that violates universally accepted moral norms. Unethical intention is the expression of one’s willingness or commitment to engage in such an action. The formal hypotheses are presented in Table 1. -------------------------------- Insert Table 1 About Here --------------------------------- METHODS Multiple online databases, professional listservs, and references from previously published review papers (i.e., Borkowski & Ugras, 1998; Ford & Richardson, 1994; Loe et al, 2000; O’Fallon & Butterfield, 2005) were searched to identify studies for our meta-analysis. The final number of independent samples was 135, comprising a total of 35,594 people aggregated across all summarized relationships. The dependent variables were unethical intention and unethical behavior, and studies were coded using their conceptual definitions as described above.