Does National Culture Affect Willingness to Justify Ethically Suspect Behaviors?

In this article, we examine the relationship of the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness national culture dimensions with the willingness of 27,459 individuals located in 21 nations to justify ethically suspect behaviors. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM), a technique well suited for cross-level studies, is employed to test the hypothesized relationships from data made available by the World Values Survey. Results support our hypotheses with regard to performance orientation, assertiveness, institutional collectivism and humane orientation. However, results surprisingly reject our hypotheses on power distance and uncertainty avoidance. We discuss these counterintuitive findings and elaborate on the study’s implications for both research and practice.