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Ethical preferences for influencing superiors: A 41-society study

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Abstract

With a 41-society sample of 9990 managers and professionals, we used hierarchical linear modeling to investigate the impact of both macro-level and micro-level predictors on subordinate influence ethics. While we found that both macro-level and micro-level predictors contributed to the model definition, we also found global agreement for a subordinate influence ethics hierarchy. Thus our findings provide evidence that developing a global model of subordinate ethics is possible, and should be based upon multiple criteria and multilevel variables.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to sincerely thank our anonymous reviewers, as well as Department Editor, Rick Larrick, for their efforts in assisting us during the development of this article.

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Correspondence to David A Ralston.

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Accepted by Rick Larrick, Departmental Editor, 28 May 2008. This paper has been with the authors for four revisions.

1University of Oklahoma, USA

2Simon Fraser University, Canada

3Instituto Tecnológico de Celaya, Mexico

4University of New South Wales, Australia

5Monash University, Malaysia

6University of Queensland Business School, Australia

7University of Westminster, UK

8ESC – Grenoble, France

9University of Zagreb, Croatia

10Lingnan University, Hong Kong

11Anabas Learning Ltd, Thailand

12University of Technology, Sydney, Australia

13University of Tennessee, USA

14University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands

15University of Maribor, Slovenia

16Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Germany

17VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

18Florida State University, USA

19Clinica De Stress E Biofeedback, Brazil

20Florida Atlantic University, USA

21University of North Texas, USA

22University of Dallas, USA

23University of Minnesota, USA

24Instituto Superior de Ciencias do Trabalho e da Empresa, Portugal

25Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

26University of Hartford, USA

27University of São Paulo, Brazil

28George Washington University, USA

29Pennsylvania State University, USA

30Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan

31Georgia State University, USA

32CEMPRE – Universidade do Porto, Portugal

33Universidad de los Andes, Colombia

34University of Western Ontario, Canada

35University of Lethbridge, Canada

36Ben-Gurion University, Israel

37University of Connecticut, USA

38Centre for International Business and Economic Research, Vilnius, Lithuania

39University of Texas at Dallas, USA

40University of Valencia, Spain

41National Economics University, Vietnam

42Seoul National University, South Korea

43National University of Singapore, Singapore

44Yuan-Ze University, Taiwan

45Catholic University of Milan, Italy

46University of Kuopio, Finland

47University of Sheffield, UK

48Retired

Appendix

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Table a1 Correlation matrixa for the 16 potential predictor variables of the business ideology modelb

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Ralston, D., Egri, C., de la Garza Carranza, M. et al. Ethical preferences for influencing superiors: A 41-society study. J Int Bus Stud 40, 1022–1045 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/jibs.2008.109

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