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

The study’s author, Chong Gao of Hong Kong Shue Yan University, situates the work within the anthropology of corporate social responsibility, a subfield that emerged in the 2000s when researchers began using ethnographic methods to examine how multinational corporations interact with local communities. Earlier anthropological studies of CSR tended to focus on transnational giants such as Coca-Cola and large mining companies, often revealing uncomfortable dynamics. Ethnographies of CSR programs run by an Israeli Coca-Cola franchise and by a transnational mining firm in South Africa showed that such initiatives could serve as vehicles for extending corporate power, securing reputations, and creating local dependence rather than genuine mutual benefit. By concentrating almost exclusively on multinationals, however, this body of work left little room to ask whether local firms in non-Western societies might have developed their own, endogenous ways of contributing to social good.

Gao’s answer is that many of them did, and that the key lies in a debate that has run through Chinese philosophy for more than two thousand years. The tension between yi, meaning righteousness or moral duty, and li, meaning profit or material benefit, traces back to Confucius and Mencius. Over the centuries, this debate produced several possible resolutions, including harnessing the desire for economic gain with righteousness, valuing righteousness above wealth, and abandoning personal interest altogether. The version that matters for business, yi-li tongyi, holds that righteousness and profit are not opponents but partners: making money in a moral way, and doing moral good in a way that sustains the business, are two sides of the same conduct. During the late Qing dynasty, when China faced pressure to build modern industry capable of competing with Western firms, this idea was recast so that developing national commercial strength through ethical means was itself defined as a form of righteousness.

The historical evidence assembled in the study spans three distinct eras of Hong Kong’s economic development. In the earliest period, from the 1850s to the 1940s, waves of migrants from the Pearl River Delta, and later from Shanghai and eastern China, arrived in a colony marked by hardship, plague, and war. Firms responded with what the study describes as mutual support in an era of hardship. Yuen Kut Lam, a medicine shop founded in 1892 in Foshan, donated its herbal ganhe tea to residents facing a plague outbreak in 1898 and has continued to offer free medical tea in Hong Kong since opening a branch there in 1906. The company’s stated philosophy, half for charity and half for business, is presented as a textbook expression of yi-li unity: the goal is not profit maximization but a balance between social benefit and commercial survival.

Food companies followed a similar logic. Garden, established in 1926, produced affordable high-nutrition biscuits in the 1930s that let lower-income families buy what had been expensive imported luxuries, manufactured compressed biscuits for the Hong Kong government during World War II, and launched its vitamin-fortified Life Bread in 1960 to combat malnutrition among the poor. Vitasoy, founded in 1940 by Dr. Lo Kwee-Seong, grew out of efforts to teach refugees to make soy milk as a cheap, nutritious alternative to unaffordable milk during a period of food shortage. Perhaps most striking is the wartime story of Tai Ping Koon Restaurant, a Western-style establishment opened in Guangzhou in 1860 and relocated to Hong Kong in 1938 ahead of the Japanese invasion. According to the restaurant’s fifth-generation managing director, refugees from Guangzhou used the restaurant as a meeting point and information exchange, gathering there to share news of the war and the welfare of relatives in an era when telephones were rare. The patronage of these customers helped the restaurant profit, while the space it provided helped a displaced community rebuild its networks, a reciprocity that benefited both sides.

The second wave, from the 1950s to the 1980s, coincided with Hong Kong’s industrialization and economic take-off, when settled migrants began constructing a local identity. Here the study shows laozihao businesses embedding themselves in community formation and cultural preservation. Teahouses such as Luk Yu Tea House, opened in 1933, became gathering places for merchants and, more broadly, custodians of Cantonese yum cha culture. The Xin Longcheng teahouse, a village-based establishment founded in 1959, functioned as an informal community canteen where elderly residents, market vendors, and bird-keepers met daily; its manager described regular customers who let themselves into the outdoor seating area, found the tea leaves, and poured their own cups before the staff arrived. The study interprets such teahouses as third places, social settings beyond home and work that foster community cohesion, and argues that their commercial activity is inseparable from the social services they quietly provide.

Traditional bakeries played a comparable cultural role. Tai Tung Bakery, established in 1943, has sold mooncakes on a twelve-month instalment plan through its Mooncake Club since the 1940s, easing the financial burden on grassroots families who needed the cakes for Mid-Autumn Festival gift exchange while securing a loyal customer base. The same shops, including Kee Wah Bakery and Hang Heung Cake Shop, both founded in 1938, preserve the complicated knowledge surrounding bridal pastries for the traditional betrothal ceremony known as guo da li, and even rent out the specialized containers required for the occasion. Tai Tung’s practice of installing a large festival flower plaque each Mid-Autumn Festival, the study notes, was justified by its second-generation owner as a way of giving the Yuen Long district a distinct identity. None of these firms used the language of CSR, which only became widespread in the 1990s; the moral vocabulary they drew on was the unity of righteousness and profit.

The third wave, from the 1990s to the present, features a younger, better-educated generation of owners who link the inherited principle to contemporary issues. Pat Sin Bakery, founded in 1965, distributes free pastries to senior citizens twice a month, and staff discreetly exceed the nominal quota of one hundred sets rather than turn away latecomers, an attention to elderly feelings that earned the shop a Good Shop Award in 2025. Wong Wing Kee Preserved Fruits Factory, established in 1901, partners with a social enterprise to bring its nostalgic products into nursing homes as memory stimulants for the aged. Sang Kee Restaurant works with NGOs on donations to the disabled, the elderly, and people in pandemic quarantine, while Man Fung Noodle Shop donates unsold but edible food, including Lunar New Year cakes, to a nonprofit restaurant that delivers them to families in need. These collaborations with social enterprises, charities, and NGOs, the study argues, show that a Confucian-era concept retains the vitality to generate social value in a modern socioeconomic environment.

The theoretical stakes of the argument are considerable. Western CSR discourse, from Bowen’s 1953 work through Friedman’s famous 1970 claim that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, frames social responsibility largely in terms of obligations arising from harm, compensation, and stakeholder management. Yi-li tongyi frames doing good differently: helping the community, employees, and fellow townsmen is not a duty separate from profit-making but its moral counterpart, embedded in the everyday conduct of the firm. Gao suggests that this principle functions as the core of an endogenous corporate culture, and possibly as a longevity gene that explains why some laozihao firms have survived more than a century while most competitors failed. The practical implication is equally pointed: companies seeking to make genuine social contributions may achieve more cultural legitimacy by mobilizing their own moral traditions than by copying CSR templates designed by and for Western multinationals. Comparative studies of how different business traditions balance social purpose and profit, the study concludes, are needed to understand the full range of relationships between firms and the societies that sustain them.

Subject of Research: An ethnographic study of how Hong Kong's time-honoured businesses practice social responsibility through the Confucian principle of unity of righteousness and profit.

Article Title: Understanding social responsibility of Hong Kong’s time-honoured business through the lens of yi-li unity

Article References: Gao, C. (2026). Understanding social responsibility of Hong Kong’s time-honoured business through the lens of yi-li unity. International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, 10(1), Article 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41257-026-00164-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s41257-026-00164-y

Keywords: corporate social responsibility, laozihao, Confucianism, yi-li unity, Hong Kong, time-honoured business, business anthropology, corporate culture, social good, business longevity, ethnography, Chinese business ethics