Traits and states at work: lure, risk and personality as predictors of occupational crime

ABSTRACT

This study linked individual characteristics to proximate factors operating in the moment of decision-making to predict occupational crime. We distinguished between people’s task-related conscience, as embodied by the Conscientiousness personality trait, and a more general moral conscience as embodied by the Honesty-Humility trait, hypothesizing that both traits are differentially related to the way situational characteristics, such as costs and benefits, are perceived. We operationalized the concept of ‘felt lure’ emanating from the benefits of a crime, defining it as an affective state that tempts people to commit a criminal act, and examined it next to perceived risk of sanction as a proximate predictor of criminal choice. In line with our predictions, Conscientiousness and Honesty-Humility significantly predicted occupational criminal choice as did felt lure and perceived risk. Specifically, perceived risk and felt lure mediated the relations between Conscientiousness and Honesty-Humility on the one hand, and occupational criminal choice on the other.

KEYWORDS:

• Personality
• rational choice
• affect
• dual-process models
• white-collar crime

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. To compare the non-respondents and respondents of the second wave, we ran a number of independent samples t-tests using the background variables age, gender, educational level, and work hours and the HEXACO Honesty-Humility and Conscientiousness domain-level variables as dependent variables and the two groups (non-respondents (N = 390) and respondents (N = 590)) as independent variable. At conventional significance levels (p < .05), the results revealed no significant differences in gender (t = 0.33, p = .74), educational level (t = 0.69, p = .49), work hours (t = 1.13, p = .26), Honesty-Humility (t = 1.69, p = .09), and Conscientiousness (t = 0.88, p = .38), and a significant difference in age, showing that the group of respondents was somewhat older (M_respondents = 42.8, SD = 11.7) than the group of non-respondents (M_{nonrespondents} = 40.5, SD = 11.0) with t = 2.97, p = .003. Except for age, the results suggest that the group of non-respondents on the second wave was not much different from the group of respondents on the variables of interest in this study.

2. Because five items of the Fairness facet of the Honesty-Humility dimension were tautological in nature for the purposes of the present research, that is showed predictor-criterion overlap (e.g. ‘I would never accept a bribe, even if it were very large’), these items were omitted from the analyses.

3. See Appendix for remaining five scenarios.

4. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for bringing this possibility to our attention.