Bank Branch Study Reveals Which Workplace Values Fuel or Fight Unethical Behavior

Why do some workplaces seem to breed dishonesty while others keep it in check? A new field study of a major Brazilian bank suggests the answer may lie less in the moral fiber of individual employees and more in the values their organizations actually prioritize. Published in the journal Trends in Psychology, the research analyzed survey data from 713 employees spread across 210 bank branches and found that specific dimensions of organizational culture—particularly values emphasizing harmony and egalitarianism—were reliably associated with lower levels of unethical behavior, while a culture of mastery, built on dominance and competitive self-assertion, was linked to more of it. The findings arrive at a moment when the banking industry, despite being among the most heavily regulated sectors in the world, continues to grapple with financial crimes and recurring corruption scandals that have eroded public trust in large corporations.

The research team, led by Juliana Barreiros Porto of the University of Brasília together with Marília Mesquita Resende, Katia Puente-Palacios, and Catherine T. Kwantes, set out to address a stubborn gap in the science of workplace ethics. Decades of studies have examined what researchers call ethical culture—the codes of conduct, ethics training, and compliance systems organizations build to steer behavior. But the authors argue that focusing only on ethics-specific infrastructure misses something fundamental: the broader cultural values that shape how employees think and act every day, whether or not those values mention ethics at all. To capture this bigger picture, they turned to a framework adapted from psychologist Shalom Schwartz’s theory of cultural values, developed for organizations by Antônio Tamayo and colleagues, which maps organizational values along three dimensions with opposing poles.

Those dimensions are worth spelling out because they carry the study’s most striking implications. The first contrasts autonomy, which emphasizes individuals pursuing their own ideas and affective experiences, with embeddedness, which stresses maintaining the status quo and restricting actions that could harm the group. The second pits hierarchy, the acceptance of unequal distribution of power and resources, against egalitarianism, the transcendence of personal interests in favor of others’ well-being. The third opposes mastery—an assertive drive to dominate, change the world, bend others to one’s desires, and demonstrate control—to harmony, an emphasis on adjusting to and fitting within the environment rather than conquering it. Each branch of the bank in the study registered its own profile across these values, allowing the researchers to ask whether branches that collectively endorsed certain values reported more or less unethical conduct.

Measuring unethical behavior is notoriously tricky, since few employees will admit to wrongdoing on a questionnaire. The researchers sidestepped this problem with a clever design built on earlier qualitative interviews with fifteen Brazilian employees, including five managers from ethics and compliance areas. From those interviews they constructed fourteen workplace scenarios, seven of which described unethical conduct. Participants were not asked about their own behavior; instead, they judged how characteristic each scenario was of their branch on a scale from zero to ten. One scenario, for example, describes an employee who needs to leave work three hours early for a birthday party without authorization and asks a coworker to clock her out while the boss is away on business. By reporting on others rather than themselves, participants could describe their environment while sidestepping some of the social desirability bias that plagues self-reports of misconduct.

The statistical architecture of the study was as important as its questions. Because culture is a shared phenomenon, the researchers first had to verify that employees within the same branch actually agreed with one another before aggregating individual responses to the group level. They used average deviation indices to screen out branches lacking consensus, then computed intraclass correlations to quantify how much of the variation in responses could be attributed to the branch rather than the individual. Notably, moral attentiveness—the tendency to chronically perceive and reflect on moral elements of everyday experience, originally conceived by psychologist Scott Reynolds as an individual trait—passed these tests as a collective construct, with intraclass coefficients of .05 for the reflective dimension and .08 for the perceptual dimension. This was itself a novel finding: a group’s shared moral attentiveness can exist as a genuine unit-level property, shaped by selection, socialization, and the standards newcomers absorb when they join a team.

When the researchers ran hierarchical linear regression models, the results delivered both confirmations and surprises. Egalitarianism and harmony emerged as the strongest protective values, each significantly and negatively predicting unethical behavior—supporting the hypothesis that cultures emphasizing concern for others and cooperative adjustment to the environment discourage misconduct. These results align with earlier meta-analytic work showing that benevolent ethical climates, which prioritize the well-being of others, are negatively related to unethical decisions. Harmony showed an additional twist: the strength of that value, meaning the degree of consensus among branch members, also contributed to lower misconduct, suggesting that when harmony is widely and strongly endorsed, the collaborative environment it creates actively discourages unethical actions. Mastery, by contrast, was significantly correlated with higher levels of unethical behavior, consistent with prior findings that aggressive, market-oriented cultures encourage employees to prioritize results over ethics and to focus on ends rather than means.

Two of the study’s predictions failed, and those failures may be the most thought-provoking results of all. Autonomy, which the authors had hypothesized would increase misconduct—drawing on research linking creativity and rule-breaking—actually correlated negatively with unethical behavior, echoing arguments by Tom Tyler and Steven Blader that self-regulation, in which employees follow rules because they choose to rather than because they fear punishment, can outperform external control. Meanwhile, collective moral attentiveness, despite emerging as a real group-level construct, did not significantly predict unethical behavior, and neither did the interactions between values and their strength. The authors suggest that moral hypocrisy may be at work: groups may maintain a positive moral self-image while failing to act morally, meaning that simply noticing and reflecting on moral issues is not enough to change conduct. Strong values, in other words, are not sufficient on their own; accountability structures, monitoring systems, and real consequences may be needed to translate values into behavior.

The study also carries a pointed message for the financial sector. A recent review of bank fraud recommended audits, fraud detection technologies, and forensic accounting as countermeasures, but the authors observe that such discussions routinely overlook cultural change and the management model itself. If mastery-driven, market-oriented cultures are associated with more misconduct, then the predominant management model in banking may deserve scrutiny alongside its control systems. One value, embeddedness, could not be tested because it showed no variation between branches—it appears to be a central value of the institution, shared so uniformly that it offered no contrast—which the authors note limits generalizability to highly normative organizations. The researchers also acknowledge the usual constraints of correlational, self-reported data: causality cannot be established, and unethical behavior might shape perceptions of culture rather than the reverse.

For managers, the practical takeaway is that aspirational value statements are not enough. The study underscores the importance of embedding values in daily practices, policies, and decision-making processes, aligning organizational systems with stated principles, and providing training that sharpens employees’ moral attentiveness and ethical decision-making skills. Future research, the authors suggest, should pursue longitudinal and experimental designs to untangle causal mechanisms, employ multi-source data to reduce bias, and identify the additional mechanisms—individual, situational, and contextual—that determine whether ethical conduct takes root. What the study makes clear is that the moral character of a workplace is not simply the sum of its people’s consciences. It is written into the values the organization lives by, and some of those values, it turns out, quietly write the rules of misconduct as well.

Subject of Research: The influence of organizational values, value strength, and collective moral attentiveness on unethical workplace behavior

Article Title: From Values to Actions: Investigating the Impact of Organizational Values and Moral Attentiveness on Unethical Behavior at Work

Article References: Porto, J. B., Resende, M. M., Puente-Palacios, K., & Kwantes, C. T. (2026). From Values to Actions: Investigating the Impact of Organizational Values and Moral Attentiveness on Unethical Behavior at Work. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00513-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00513-y

Keywords: organizational values, unethical behavior, ethical culture, moral attentiveness, workplace ethics, organizational psychology, banking sector, moral identity, multilevel analysis, corporate culture, business ethics, Brazil