Moral Reactions to Bribery are Fundamentally Different for Managers Witnessing and Managers Committing Such Acts: Tests of Cognitive-Emotional Explanations of Bribery

We propose to introduce a tougher test of the effects of shame and pride by proposing attitudes as measured control variables. Attitudes are probably the most researched micro determinants of decision making in the behavioral, social, and managerial sciences, and have played an important role in business ethics in general (e.g., Fleischman 2019; Kashif et al. 2018; Quinn 1997; Murphy et al. 1992; Randall 1989), and in research into bribery as well (e.g., Wated and Sanchez 2005). Unlike emotions, attitudes are evaluative responses (e.g., good-bad) that are thought to influence decisions, intentions, and plans. As shown in Fig. 1b, attitudes toward accepting bribes and attitudes toward refusing bribes are included as mediators parallel to shame and pride, respectively. We stress that the inclusion of attitudes as mediators and contingent mediators is done to provide rival hypotheses for the roles of shame and pride and thereby increase the difficulty of demonstrating effects for the self-conscious emotions. In other words, we desire to see the incremental contribution of our new hypotheses over and above longstanding predictions for attitudes.