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Can Anticipating Time Pressure Reduce the Likelihood of Unethical Behaviour Occurring?

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Abstract

Time pressure has been shown to have a negative impact on ethical decision-making. This paper uses an experimental approach to examine the impact of an antecedent of time pressure, whether it is anticipated or not, on participants’ perceptions of unethical behaviour. Utilising 60 business school students at an Australian university, we examine the differential impact of anticipated and unanticipated time deadline pressure on participants’ perceptions of the likelihood of unethical behaviour (i.e. plagiarism) occurring. We find the perception of the likelihood of unethical behaviour occurring to be significantly reduced when time pressure is anticipated rather than unanticipated. The implications of this finding for both professional service organisations and tertiary institutions are considered.

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Notes

  1. Prior plagiarism studies (e.g. Carroll 2002) made the distinction between intentional and unintentional plagiarism, where intentional plagiarism arises due to the “deliberate act of” plagiarising whereas unintentional plagiarism largely arises from a lack of knowledge of how to reference correctly (Park 2003, p. 476). This study focuses on the student’s perception of the propensity to engage in intentional plagiarism.

  2. In the university where this experiment was carried out, the penalties imposed on minor plagiarism (classified as minor breaches of academic conduct), moderate plagiarism (classified as moderate breaches of academic conduct) and major plagiarism (classified as major breaches of academic conduct) are different and increases as the seriousness (or moral intensity) of the plagiarism act increases.

  3. Earlier versions of the instrument were pilot tested using academic staff, PhD candidates and a separate group of 40 business postgraduate coursework students.

  4. The student in the ‘Anticipated’ time deadline pressure condition is referred to as Student X and the student in the ‘unanticipated’ time deadline pressure condition is referred to as Student Y.

  5. To control for any order effects, the order of the questions for the dependent variable was randomised, producing three unique orders for each experiment condition (Harsha and Knapp 1990). Analysis revealed the different orders of the questions had no impact on the test variables.

  6. A review of the ethical decision-making literature applying the dual process model can be found in Craigie (2011) and Cummins and Cummins (2012). Dedeke (2015) proposes a cognitive intuitionist model that is a variant of the dual process model.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Academic staff and PhD students of the Accounting and Finance Discipline Group at The University of Western Australia Business School and the facilitators and participants at the 2013 University of Western Australia Albany Writers Retreat for their assistance, the anonymous reviewer and participants at the 2010 and 2013 Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand Annual Conferences, 5th Asia Pacific Conference on Educational Integrity, 20th Annual Symposium on Ethics Research in Accounting, 2015 American Accounting Association Annual Meeting UWA Business School Accounting and Finance seminar series for feedback on earlier versions of this research. Human research ethics approval for this study has been granted by the participating university. We would also like to thank Markus Milne (editor) and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and insightful feedback on this manuscript.

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  1. Accounting and Finance Discipline, UWA Business School, The University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia

    Hwee Ping Koh & David R. Woodliff

  2. School of Accounting, Curtin University of Technology, Bentley, WA, Australia

    Glennda Scully

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Koh, H.P., Scully, G. & Woodliff, D.R. Can Anticipating Time Pressure Reduce the Likelihood of Unethical Behaviour Occurring?. J Bus Ethics 153, 197–213 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3352-y

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