State-of-the-Art Theories and Empirical Evidence by Roshima Said Noor Zahirah Mohd Sidek Zubir Azhar & Khairul Anuar Kamarudin

Author:Roshima Said, Noor Zahirah Mohd Sidek, Zubir Azhar & Khairul Anuar Kamarudin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

The Individual Factors

The scope of this study focuses on the individual factors as a predictor towards corporate crime because interpersonal levels in individuals will lead to ethical decision behaviours. Vitell and Hidago (2006) suggested that individuals working in an organisation should first agree to the fact that ethics is an important factor before their behaviours develop into more ethical and thus reflected in higher responsibility towards organisation. Knouse and Giacalone (1992) stated that individual differences (moral-related individual differences and morals-unrelated individual differences), interpersonal levels and organisational level are antecedents’ factors to ethical decision behaviours. Individuals are influenced by culture values surrounding them. Hofstede (1980) defined culture as the interactive of common characteristics that influence a human group’s response to its environment. Culture determines the identity of human group in the same way as personality determines the identity of an individual. The word “culture” is usually reserved for societies (in modern world known as “nation”) or ethnic or regional group, but it can be applied equally to other human collectives or categories: an organisation, a profession or a family. From this definition, it shows that culture refers to the collective of knowledge, education, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion and possessions acquired by a group of people through individual. Culture is the structure of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people. Different cultural groups are perceived to have different way of thinking. Additionally, different cultural groups feel, act or behave differently. Different cultural groups with different beliefs, norms and value system can influence the members of the community to behave and act in different way and should be considered acceptable by the other members in the group. Fontaine and Richardson (2003) showed that there was a link between culture, individual personality, pressure from peers, self-efficacy, trust and environment stimuli towards behaviour. To involve or not in corporate crimes, it depends on the behaviour of the individual and beliefs that they carried in themselves.

Figure 1 shows the link between individual factors and behaviour. In Fig. 1 an individual factor acts as one of the important aspects for behaviour of an individual. Different background, traditions, customs, way of life and philosophy inside an individual will direct to different behaviour.

Fig. 1Some of the factors that contribute to behaviour.

Source adapted from Fontaine and Richardson (2003)

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