About Face: How Employee Dishonesty Influences A Stakeholder's Image of an Organization

Abstract

This article presents a model of employee dishonesty and formation of stakeholders' images of organizations, which applies theories of moral judgment and attribution. It describes the person-situation interaction effects of characteristics of employee behavior and of persons making moral judgments on stakeholders' moral judgments, amounts of blame, loci of blame, and images of organizations. Using a situationally based definition of dishonesty, the article examines the effects of the act, the actor, the result, the person affected, and the intent of an employee's behavior on stakeholders' images of the organization, as well as the effects of the characteristics of the person making the moral..