Understanding cheating behaviours: proactive and reactive intentions

ABSTRACT

The understanding of a wide array of practices related to fraud, bribery, corruption, and more widely, illicit practices have been capturing the attention of practitioners and management researchers worldwide. A substantial portion of the extant research has used university students to measure their actual or intended cheating behaviours and often studies have tested for variations across countries and cultures. We highlight some major concerns in this stream of inquiry and discuss both the definition and some inconclusive results in prior studies, namely those deriving from differences in cheating behaviour across different cultural contexts. We suggest the need to examine intentionality, and further advance that intentionality may assume a reactive or a proactive essence. Depending on the social and formal contexts of different countries, both reactive and proactive intentions lead to distinct moral concerns, which we name in this work omorality (meaning ‘our morality’) or immorality (in the traditional sense).

KEYWORDS:

• Cheating
• context
• intentionality
• intention
• morality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethical approval

This paper does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Notes

1. Please note that the authors do not defend an essentialist understanding of a culture as cultures are not monolithic and individuals do not act monolithically. Individuals form distinct groups, emerging from larger and broader groups, such as nationalities or organizations, interact in response to one another. Thus, interactions help shaping and developing cultures.