Teaching ethics through court judgments in Finance, Accounting, Economics and Business

Ethics in future employment within a company: “Compliance”

The term “compliance” means knowing and following all relevant laws, rules, policies, regulations and standards, and ensuring that organisations adhere to all applicable legal requirements (Wulf 2012). Being compliant not only requires the implementation of an effective internal control system (Namiri & Stojanovic 2007), but also having a set of codes of conduct. This requires implementing an ethics and compliance programme before establishing legal standards (Wulf 2012).

Whether establishing ethical principles or codes of conduct, companies need to build confidence between the employer or boss and the employees in order “to promote a culture of respect towards the law” (Supreme Court, 20/02/2016). Although these codes are not yet practiced routinely in companies (Pater Van Gils 2003), they are indeed models for cooperation between the operational processes of the organisation and its management (Wieland 2015). They are also a point of orientation for professional action and legal evaluation (Hubig 2001). These principles or codes can be used as a basis for operational requirements, as well as operational prohibitions. Moreover, they provide methods for getting help or advice, and procedures employees can follow in the event of having to report a violation. Employees should be guided towards the right ethical behaviour in such a way that they know how to behave in ambiguous situations. Some organisations tend to use their codes of conduct to cope with differences in ethical values between different cultures and to serve as a tool for decision-making processes (Adam & Fachman-Moore 2004).

For instance, the OECD elaborates its own set of guidelines related to business ethics for multinational companies. Their recommendations highlight aspects such as business ethics, human rights, environment, fraud, competition or bribery (OECD 2009). Such guidelines also provide voluntary standards for companies to take into account along with the relevant laws. The idea is to ensure that operations do indeed comply with the legal regulations and government policies in all countries involved (OECD 2008).

The aim of these procedures is to minimise any negative consequences, not only for employees but also for companies and society in general. 

To raise students’ awareness of how to avoid illegal conduct or crimes and their consequences in their future jobs, they need to be aware of the negative effects crimes have on individuals, companies and society (Godson & Kenney 2000). These negative effects have specific consequences for individuals, employees and companies if they go beyond the legal limit.

In order to catalogue the consequences of ethical behaviour of individuals, employees, companies and society, we must contextualise the meaning of these consequences:

1. Individuals: especially among university students, those who commit an illegal act will receive an undesirable mark, not only as regards their reputation but also as part of their academic file.
2. Employees: those consequences referring directly or indirectly to employees’ rights.
3. Companies: damages caused to productivity, profits, image, trade and other negative consequences.
4. Society: if the impact of the illegal act extends beyond the boundaries of a company and affects national interests and financial markets as a whole, the consequences, as understood by Marinucci Dolcini (2002) could be: flight of capital, falling stock prices, the ruin of small savers, the involvement of the banking system or a collective dismissal of employees.

In Figure 2, we move from the general consequences of “prohibited and accepted acts” and "ethical decisions" in Figure 1, to “ethical consequences for employees, companies and society”.

We also include "omissions" with performing actions and also “ethical decisions”. Whereas "omissions" are formally included within the scope of legal regulations, "ethical decisions" are omitted. Hence, our work focuses on filling these gaps and providing solutions that legal regulations cannot. For example, in omissions, we can outline a few examples, such as "insensitivity to the demands and concerns of employees", "disregard for the negative consequences of the company’s activity with regards to the environment", or “exception for discharges of illegal chemicals”. Along with the stated omissions, there is a broad range of “ethical decision” options for each topic.

Figure 2: Consequences of the acts, omissions and ethical decisions outlined in court sentences


The consequences of “prohibited acts”, “accepted acts or omissions” and “ethical decisions” for individuals, employees, the company and society from a social standpoint can be divided into four cases, from lowest to highest in ethical terms.

In the 1st case, all prohibited acts, as mentioned above, generate unethical behaviour, which is very negative for employees and company alike, generating social disapproval if discovered.

In the 2nd case, we note to a lesser extent that acts accepted by the law and certain omissions can cause unethical consequences with an indifferent" or negative effect both to the employees and the company. This generally produces social disapproval when known.

From another perspective, although the 3rd case refers to the same casuistry as the previous case, a large majority of actions accepted by the legal system yield a positive effect on employees and the company, both of which are accompanied by social and personal approval.
The 4th case addresses ethical decisions, found mainly in the codes of practice fostered by corporate compliance in companies. Undoubtedly, at this stage, we are seeing behavioural excellence with positive implications for both the employees and the company, and with high personal and social connotations of approval.

In the last case, ethical decisions will depend not only on the employees’ values but also on their operating principles. Decision-making that focuses on being more compliant with companies’ organisational rules must be learned at university.

The next section addresses methodology based on the description of acts, omissions and ethical decisions outlined above. We classify not only implicit illegal acts and omissions found in the judgment, but also the ethical choices made by students in order to avoid unlawful behaviour at the university and companies.

Methodology and Methods

After the Innovation Project of the University of Extremadura was given the green light in 2014, fifteen teachers from the Business Management and Sociology, Finance and Accounting, and Economy departments formed a working group. The group called itself the Educational Innovation Group. Their aim was twofold: on the one hand, they intended to articulate the literature review process, to define and test several hypotheses and to determine the phases of the project; and on the other hand, to organise the teachers who would be conducting the study in their classrooms.

Based on the literature review, the group proposed several hypotheses related to: 1) Methodology of studying ethics through cross-sectional competences at university; 2) Ethical content based on the differences between “illegal acts” and “unethical behaviour” and their consequences for students, employees, companies and society; and 3) Ethical approaches to students’ future employment within a company.

1. H₁ – Students highly value the study of ethics through court judgments based on legal/illegal acts and ethical/unethical behaviour.
2. H₂ – A considerable number of students prefer a cross-sectional approach based on judgments to study ethical competences.
3. H₃ – In the context of teaching technical perspectives instead of ethical ones, students compromise their personal (ethical) gain by behaving unethically.
4. H₄ – At present, ethics is regarded as important for students’ future employment in companies.
5. H₅ – From students’ perspectives, ethical behaviour has important consequences for employees, companies and society.

Thus, a first general meeting was convened to shape the work practices and the phases of the project. Six meetings were held over a period of two months, and the project was divided into nine stages: 1) Training activity on the concept of "ethical commitment" by an ethics teacher; 2) Selection of the court judgments to be studied; 3) Drafting of a questionnaire based on the project objectives; 4) Study of the court judgment by the teachers, determining the number of unethical behaviours and their typologies; 5) Conducting a pre-test among the students; 6) Organising the completion of the study by teachers; 7) Data tabulation; 8) Presenting the study to those responsible for the Innovation Project; and 9) Holding a meeting to assess the results with teachers.

The Innovation Group started with a total of 25 judgments extracted from the database of the General Judiciary in Spain during the years 2013 and 2014. In choosing the final judgments, and the group focused on ones related to economic, financial and management matters. Obviously, the judgment with the highest number of illegal acts (and implicit unethical behaviour) was accepted, but the selection also included judgments that were in line with other determining factors, such as:

1. Extension of the judgment. The "issues of fact" should not exceed 10-15 pages to ensure the students could read it in class or at home.
2. Non-discriminatory. The content of the judgment should not include statements that could be regarded as discriminatory behaviour based on race, social matters, religion, etc.

The selection criteria were based on the eight illegal acts appearing in the judgments and classified in the categories below, ordered from A to H.

The three judgments finally chosen from the initial selection were those that included the highest number of illegal behaviours, so as to obtain a greater representation in a single document. These were: 16/2013 of the High Court of Andalusia (TSAR), 307/2014 of the Provincial Court of Zaragoza and 35/2014 of the Provincial Court of Guadalajara.     

Table 1: List of illegal acts


To familiarise the members of the team with these judgments, a law professor and specialist in this area of knowledge prepared a brief summary of the three judgments, which were later given to the university students participating in the study, and which read as follows:

1. Judgment 16/2013 of the High Court of Andalusia, Social Chamber. An appellate judgment concerning a disciplinary dismissal. The dismissal letter contained therein was very interesting for our purposes and it also served to explore other circumstances where the employer used public information for private benefit. It was about the dismissal of a female worker by the company director, who was in fact the employee’s husband. The female employee had managed to slip through several controls and audits.
2. Judgment 307/2014 of the Provincial Court of Zaragoza. This is a judgment based on the acts of a mayor who carried out some urban development projects, setting up a public company that traded urban soil for housing and other infrastructures in exchange for a symbolic price. Other companies were involved in the plot, which was further complicated by fraudulent grants and complaints from the opposition councillors.
3. Judgment 35/2014 of the Provincial Court of Guadalajara. Many censurable acts also converge in this case. Chinese entrepreneurs executed slave contracts with other compatriots who were brought to Spain fraudulently. National entrepreneurs collaborated in this business. The judgment contained a number of cases of Social Security system fraud, which violated some of the most basic labour laws, in addition to others that would simply be classified as human errors.

Despite the third judgment being the one encompassing the most offences, we noted from the summary that it entailed considerable discrimination towards the Chinese community in Spain, which was not in line with the criteria used to choose the judgments, as outlined above (i.e. extension and non-discrimination). This explains why we chose the judgment of the Supreme Court of Andalusia for the purposes of our study.

At a subsequent meeting, the working group discussed the content of the questionnaire presented to the students through the Google Doc tool to make any necessary improvements. Several questions were clarified to ensure optimal student understanding.

In the context of anonymity, a set of personal questions constituted the first block of the questionnaire. This information included respondents’ age, gender, degree, course, campus, subject, teacher and average marks of the previous year.

The second block of questions, related to “Teaching Ethics through Court Judgments” in the first part of Figure 3, was designed to ascertain the number of unethical behaviours students were able to detect in the judgment, prioritising the three they considered most important. Then, in order to build ethical decision-making skills, we divided the second block into two main sub-sections called “University” and “Company”, according to the ethical aspects (see Figure 3).

Figure 3: Process for teaching ethics through judgments and sentences


The University section focuses on options for incorporating practical cross-sectional studies based on court judgments into each subject. Student feedback was collected on specific options for how to tackle the effects of unethical behaviour at University, such as plagiarism and cheating on exams. This block also compares the methodology based on judgments with other methodologies, such as: “Classes on ethics in the form of seminars or additional courses”, “Showing movies with ethical content”, “Reading business news about ethics”. This block of issues addresses hypotheses H1, H2 and H3.

In the Company section, students were asked about aspects related to their future employment within a company (as employers or employees) under the framework of the recently amended L.O. 1/2015, of 1 July. That law compels all companies to implement “special control and surveillance measures” based on ethical codes. The answers show how much importance students assign to ethical conduct in companies, and what ethical consequences the unethical behaviour has for them and also for society in general. Hypotheses H4 and H5 are analysed in this section.

Once the information was properly structured, a pre-test was conducted in a class of 20 students to validate the questionnaire.

In order to complete the test, we prepared a PowerPoint presentation that explained the objectives of the project. The objectives were based on two aspects: being able to detect illegal and unethical behaviour and proposing improvements through ethical decisions.

The students used a computer to complete the questionnaire and had two hours to do so. The results were generated automatically and downloaded into an Excel spreadsheet.

Results

The survey was conducted between 20 February and 20 May 2015. A total of 467 students participated, but 11 questionnaires were discarded for not complying with the questionnaire requirements. The final sample thus consisted of 456 students.

The study was conducted with graduate level students in the areas of Finance and Accounting, Business, Economy, and Law and Sociology at the University of Extremadura.

As far as the distribution by academic year, more 1st-year students (43%) participated than students in their 3rd year (26%). The participation rate was under 20% for students in other years: 2nd year (18%), 4th year (12%) and other years (1%). Over 50% of students (233) who participated in the study were between 20 and 22 years old, and 24% were between 17 and 19 years old. Students aged between 23 and 25, and over 26 represented 26% of the total sample. In relation to gender, the percentage of participating women (60%), corresponding to 273 students, was higher than men (40%), or 183 students.

The 456 students participated in the study through different subjects, such as: Financial Accounting and Companies I and II (19% and 29.28%, respectively), Strategic Management (16%), Sociology (15%), Business Administration II (10%), Financial Planning and Business Valuation (13%) and less than 10% from other subjects: Sociology of Leisure and Tourism (8%), Business Administration (7%), Business Economics (5%). Finally, less than 5% of participants came from the courses Sociology of Gender Relations and Families, Introduction to Statistics, Introduction to Business Research and Tourism III, and Marketing and Administrative Law.

Hypotheses

H₁ – Students highly value studying ethics through court judgments based on “legal/illegal acts and ethical/unethical behaviour”
Ethical competences might be developed first through a vertical approach, such as studying philosophical principles in class (Felton & Sims 2005; McDonald 2004), seminars on ethics (Oddo 1997, 293) or including courses on ethics as an additional subject (Moore 2004, Ritter 2006 Thornberg 2008); Secondly, a cross-sectional perspective could be incorporated by dealing with ethical dilemmas (Zych 1999), watching movies from corporate standpoints (Higgins & Striegel 2003) or through the subject matter of this article, learning through legal judgments.

In this regard, students were asked Question 1: Which methodology would be the best to help you improve your ethical attitudes in the field of business? Select the response that interests you most. The most selected response was “Cross-sectional cases, learning through judgments” (40%), about double the number compared to the others, namely “Cross-sectional learning through business dilemmas” (21%), “Classes on ethics either in the form of seminars or additional courses” (20%), “Showing movies with ethical content” (14%), and finally, “Reading business news about ethics” (4%) (See Table 2). Thus, a large percentage of the students favour learning ethics through cross-sectional cases rather than a vertical approach. Within the cross-sectional approach, they strongly prefer to arrive at ethical decisions through judgments rather than solving ethical business dilemmas. The reason for this may come from the recent compliance actions in Spain, in which the prevention of illegal behaviours in companies affects not only firms but also employees. Consequently, students who will join company ranks after finishing their degrees want to learn how they will be able to cope with the law´s negative consequences through behaving more responsibly.

Table 2: Methodologies to enhance ethical attitudes


However, based on this ethical training, students become aware of differences in business practices, whether illegal, unethical or both. Ethical training is important for two reasons: first, to familiarise students with the illegal acts appearing in the judgment, which can result in sanctions that cause personal and organisational damage; and second, to help students see wrong behaviour in order to make ethical decisions, which is the ultimate aim of this research.

Related to the first goal, we asked students Question 2: The General Judiciary in Spain classified different groups of illegal acts between 2013 and 2014 (unfair competition, labour exploitation, the use of public information for private purposes, tax falsehoods and inaccurate documentation, strategies for tax evasion, flight of capital, biased economic information and manipulation of balances). Can you identify how many of these appear in the judgment?

From the results, it appears that students generally saw three illegal acts in the judgment: “the use of public information for private purposes”, “tax falsehoods and inaccurate documentation” and “biased economic information”. 95% and 92% of students spotted the first and the second acts, respectively, while the third act was selected by 84% of students.
In order to take the concept of “ethical decisions” further, we adopted a broader framework, moving from illegal acts to unethical behaviour. So we asked students Question 3: If you identified any unethical behaviour, please indicate the three you found most important. An example was added to ensure that they understood the question properly: Answer by putting them in order of importance, summarising their contents in a brief sentence, for example: 1. Employee abuse. 2. Misappropriation of company funds, etc.

According to the questionnaire, and considering the crimes and/or unethical behaviour cited most by students, we observed that they were capable of differentiating between “illegal acts” and “unethical behaviour”, although they were not able to pinpoint the exact regulation behind them due to a lack of legal knowledge.

Table 3 represents the main illegal acts and unethical behaviours pointed out by students from the sample (439 responses). We had the support of a law professor to confirm the illegal acts and clarify whether these acts can be classified in the 4th case or not.

Table 3: Main illegal acts and unethical behaviours noted in the court judgment


With the illegal acts and unethical behaviours in mind, we asked students to analyse whether it was possible to make correct decisions to ascertain the judge’s opinion beforehand. After the students had read the case, we asked them Question 4: Do you think one can take the right decisions from the point of view of business and professional ethics in the case we are analysing? The importance of this question lies in student’s ability to identify possible improvements of the judgment in question from an ethical point of view. Through “moral imagination”, we asked them to try and see the situation through the eyes of others and solve the illegal and unethical behaviour detected in the judgment (Biss 2014).

Students could respond in three ways. If students responded negatively, they would rule out any option for improving the management of the company from an ethical point of view. Conversely, if they answered positively, it would demonstrate that students were not only aware of the mistakes the company made, but also that they already have the knowledge to redirect unethical behaviours towards ethical ones. In the third case, students were aware that the behaviour was misinterpreted and badly applied but did not know the solution.

Table 4: Ability to make sound decisions


Thus, the teacher's task should focus on providing decision-making tools for students who have answered positively, which, as indicated in Table 4, represented more than two-thirds (69%) of the respondents. The aim would be to prioritise the potential measures to be taken. Almost 30% do not have sufficient arguments to make ethical decisions, but approximately one-third do. This shows that there is still a long way to go to demonstrate the importance of ethics in decision-making and the methods to correct any wrong decisions.

As mentioned above, the aim of this study is to raise university students´ awareness of the legal boundaries of their behaviour and the unethical behaviour linked thereto. It also addresses a second phase focused more on reorienting such illegal behaviour. Thus, in this study, students were asked to provide answers in relation to a real and objective situation that could occur in the future, organised by the degree of importance they assigned according to their priorities. In short, from a context of ethical reflection on actions and behaviours, students suggested different ways to reorient the conduct sanctioned by law, thus addressing the goal of this research.

This process also allowed us to classify how students prioritised decisions when discussing matters related to ethical aspects that are of greatest concern to them. Reflecting on unethical and/or criminal behaviours necessarily involves students taking ethical decisions. To this end, we asked Question 4.1: Describe three ethical decisions that could have prevented what happened. Write them in order of importance. Of the 316 students who answered correctly, many of them formulated different solutions that could have been adopted to prevent the penalty imposed in the judgment.

From among the ethical decisions made by students (Figure 4), those focusing on behaviours related to "preventing the abuse of power" by using a job title or position for personal gain are worthy of mention. Secondly, students (135) highlighted the importance of "employees complying with the company rules" and thirdly, "returning overcharged money" (115 students).
For Ethical Decision 2, 168 students rated as highest the need to improve (through courses and/or training) the “honesty" that managers should demonstrate towards employees when performing their job. In second place, 135 students thought that the Human Resources Department should address the problems of improper hiring and thus "eliminate favouritism in the company"; and thirdly, 105 students said that “receiving a course in business ethics” would be helpful to improve their ethical behaviour as employees. As can be seen, students feel it is important to address ethical procedures in order to develop the ethical view of managers and employees, as “compliance measures” suggest.

In Ethical Decision 3, the top priority is to make the recruitment system more professional by "adjusting the recruitment process to professional criteria" (160 students); in second place, "returning overcharged money" (148 students) and finally, "employees complying with the legal rules" (144 students). Ethical decisions to be taken in the company refer to a lesser extent to "promoting transparency in the company", "separating professional from personal life" and "incentivising employees to improve productivity."

Thus, to adopt the measures they would normally take in order to act properly in the company, students proposed on the one hand to eliminate unethical behaviour such as "the lack of managerial supervision over the team" and "failure to report information to the service manager but to the manager instead"; and on the other hand, they highlighted "ethical acts" such as: "sending the accountancy books to the general director and area managers", "tracking the hours worked and extra hours on the CLAU programme" and “the General Manager’s discovery of a dysfunction in the price/real time spent on the service". All of these issues could have been resolved if companies and employees had developed their “compliance surveillance measures”.

Figure 4: Ethical decisions taken by students


H₂ – A considerable number of students prefer a cross-sectional approach based on judgments to study ethical competences
Upon finding that students considered “cross-sectional learning through judgments” to be a relevant tool to study ethics at the university in the Financial, Business and Accounting areas, the Innovation Group was interested in ascertaining whether students would be willing to include ethics in the curricula of each subject. To this end, students were asked Question 5. In order to promote this competency and deepen knowledge, do you think practical exercises and case studies should be included in the curricula of each subject? The responses obtained and represented in Table 5 show that 91% of the students favour this type of participatory methodology. This result supports Hypothesis 2 and is the path being taken by the Educational Innovation Group.

Before including these cross-sectional cases, it is relevant to know whether teachers currently ever make any ethics references in their classes. To date, no teachers in the above programmes have explicitly included content related to "ethical commitment" in the subjects per the guidelines issued by the competent authorities on how to prepare the syllabi in Finance and Accounting, Business Management and Tourism education. This explains Question 6: Did the teacher dedicate a section of the subject to ethics? If so, how much? As stated in Table 6, 89% of students said that scattered references to ethics were made in class (specifically, only one class on average), and thought it would be helpful if the teachers were able to include more structured ethical cases. This is further proof that business and financial education continues to be based on pragmatic, superficial and utilitarian content instead of ethical content (Cragg 1997, McDonald 2004, Sims & Felton 2006, Sánchez 1997).

Table 5: Including cross-sectional learning through judgments in the curricula of each subject


Table 6: References to ethics in class


H₃ – In the context of teaching technical perspectives instead of ethical ones, students compromise their personal (ethical) gain by behaving unethically
Pragmatic, superficial and utilitarian content taught at university focus exclusively on competitiveness and outcomes (Cragg 1997, McDonald 2004, Sims & Felton 2006, Sánchez 1997) and maximising profit (McDonald & Donleavy 1995: 841, Gavin & Klinefelter 1988: 24) but need to be supplemented with ethical knowledge.

Table 7a: Plagiarism at the University


Some authors have explained the consequences of this type of teaching in Financial, Business and Accounting areas for students, saying it can compromise students’ ethical principles for personal gain and be used as a vehicle for personal success (Ureña 1999), (Teixeira & Rocha 2010). Obvious dysfunctions are noted, such as: plagiarism, which is perceived as a growing problem requiring increased time and resources to combat (Smith et al., 2007) (Gullifer & Tyson 2010) and cheating on exams (Amen et al., 1996), (Rakovski et al., 2007). Given these circumstances, we asked students Question 7: Have you ever committed plagiarism in your classwork, thereby cheating yourself and your teachers? Have you ever copied in an exam, thereby cheating yourself and your teachers? As we can see in Tables 7a and 7b, 35% of students openly confess that they have written essays unethically, and in some cases, even illegally. Also, 26% of students often copy in exams. These percentages correspond to findings upon which Hypothesis 3 is based, and are an increasing concern for teachers at the University of Extremadura for two reasons: first, if students fail to comply with the rules at university, they will most likely do the same in their future work; second, these unethical behaviours are another consequence of teaching from only a pragmatic and utilitarian approach, where ethics are not taught or considered.

H₄ – At present, ethics is regarded as important for students’ future employment
After being asked about the options for incorporating ethical decisions that help reorient unethical behaviour, it is important to ascertain how relevant students believe ethics is for their future professional career. The amended version of the Spanish Criminal Code (L.O. 5/2010) is being applied in order to introduce “special control and surveillance measures” to ensure compliance with the law. Now, more than ever, it is extremely important “to promote a culture of respect towards the right decisions” (Supreme Court, 20.02.2016) by implementing “codes of practice". Although these professional codes of ethics are not yet practiced openly in companies (Pater Van Gils, 2003), they can be useful to companies if the models for cooperation are integrated into the organisation and its operations management (Wieland, 2015). This is a point of orientation for professional action and legal evaluation (Hubig, 2001).

Table 7b: Copying in University exams


Students were then asked Question 8: Developing a profession ethically means always trying to ensure that our work conforms to a set of codes, such as "not committing fraud", "transparency" and “honesty". How important is this for you in your future job?” As shown in Table 8, three-quarters of the students (74.99%) considered these codes for ethical conduct to be very important in their future jobs, and 22% believe it to be fairly important. These results are in alignment with Hypothesis 4. It is surprising to see that no students responded "not important” and only one out of the 456 students answered "somewhat important”. The results gave the group a better idea of the scope of what is really needed to address this type of knowledge in teaching.

Table 8: Importance of ethics in students’ future jobs


H₅ – From students’ perspectives, ethical behaviour has important consequences for employees, companies and society
In light of this consideration, we asked Question 9: If you had to categorise the consequences that such behaviour has for the company, what value would you give them? As shown in Table 9, 57% of students answered "Quite a number of consequences, as the company’s productivity and its corporate image would be affected" and 38% answered "Many consequences: unethical behaviour detected in this case seriously damages the company”. This shows that 95% of students are highly aware of the close relationship between ethical behaviour and company activities. In addition, student responses show they were relating ethics not only to internal attitudinal aspects of companies, but also to other external factors which are highly valued by companies, such as "productivity" and "corporate image". Among the main consequences of unethical behaviour for the company are: "increased costs, losses in service", "bad image for the customer", "loss of confidence of the managers with respect to employees", and "favouritism in the recruitment process".

Table 9: Consequences of unethical behaviour for companies

The connotations of such behaviour not only transcend the legal entity, but are also reflected in the individual, i.e. among colleagues united by a professional relationship. This explains Question 10: Imagine a relationship between co-workers that involves unethical behaviour. Classify the consequences it has for the other co-workers. In this case, “abusing their trust” and “developing unethical behaviour” can be quite harmful to others. In fact, at a rate somewhat lower than the consequences for the company but also noteworthy, 54.70% of students believed that acting unethically would have "quite a number of consequences," arguing that "bad business practices may affect personal, professional and family life". Similarly, and to an even greater degree of gravity, nearly 30% believed that "bad business and professional practices" would certainly have many consequences (see Table 10).

If we limit ourselves to the societal level, we can see that unethical behaviour can sometimes have a social impact beyond that of a strictly professional or business relationship. In this case, we can standardise a series of behaviours that affect not only the relationships between professionals and companies, but can also become part of the very culture of societies. Attitudes such as: unpaid taxes, capital flight, respect towards employees' rights and correct treatment within the company, may become favourable or contrary to the society that employees and businesses share.

We then formulated Question 11: If you had to classify the consequences such behaviour has for society, what value would you give them? In this regard, and as shown in Table 11, students detected how serious "unethical behaviour” is for society and how it transcends to other spheres for their adverse effect on society. More often than not, these behaviours take the form of crimes – regardless of whether or not they are eventually proven. Just over one-third (39%) said that unethical behaviour has "quite a number of consequences, as bad business practices can affect the social life as a whole". Almost as many students (35%) believed that it has "many consequences: unethical behaviour detected in the company undoubtedly transcends to society and a corrupt environment becomes widespread". Overall, most students are pretty aware of the consequences of unethical conduct for the company, co-employees and society, as predicted in Hypothesis 5.

Table 10: Consequences of unethical behaviour for colleagues


Table 11: Consequences of unethical behaviour for society