Unethical Behaviour Of Managers In The Public And Private Corporate Organisations In Nigeria

ABSTRACT

It is a sad truth that the employees of just about every business, in every business, will occasionally encounter team members who are taking part in unethical behaviours. Such unethical behaviours include a wide variety of different activities. Among the most common unethical business behaviour of employees are making long-distance calls on business lines, duplicating software for use at home, falsifying the number of hours worked, or much more serious and illegal practices such as embezzling money from the business or falsifying business records. This study investigated Unethical Behaviour of managers in Public and Private Corporate Organisations‖ using selected companies in Nigeria. Survey method of research was mainly used in the study. Method of data collection was structured questionnaire administered on managers of selected companies in Nigeria. A sample size of 560 managers was selected for the study using stratified random sampling method, out of which 220 copies of the questionnaires were received and adjudged usable for the analysis. Analysis of data was carried out with the aid of Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS v. 14). Findings revealed that both public and private organizations encourage ethical practices in organizations, correlation coefficient value for CCPVT and STEAL was r = .740** RISKK, WHSTB and ARRST were (r =.3.92; r=066 and r = 0.236) all positively correlate, the level of corruption in the country has a significant effect on the operations of managers in both private and public organizations, that managers in both public and private sectors resist corporate unethical standards in their operations in an attempt to achieve organisations‘ objectives, while KLTMC and GODFR were (r = 0.384 and r = 0.135), CRDT, FLSDL and ACAST were (r = 0.352, r = 0.324 and r = 0.312). For the last hypothesis the coefficient for INSRS and JUDOR were (r = 0.475 and r = 0.426) respectively. The implications of these results were that top management officers in either public or private organizations encourage honesty and openness among workers in their organizations. The study therefore recommended that efforts should be made to reduce or totally prevent any act of embezzlement in either the public or private organizations in Nigeria through the use of control system and work procedure. Effort by any employee to circumvent the accepted work procedure should therefore be conceived as a means of sabotaging the organization‘s good intention towards effective performance and productivity.