Ethical Behavior at Work Scale (EBAW): Construction and Evidence of Validity

Abstract

Research on ethical behavior at work presents methodological challenges to minimize the impact of cultural characteristics and social desirability inherent to this phenomenon. The general objective of this study is to build and gather validity evidence for a scale of ethical behavior at work in Brazilian Portuguese that includes everyday behaviors and is applicable to most occupations. An item neutralization method was used in the scale construction. To collect evidence of validity, exploratory factor analysis was performed with a sample of 298 workers and convergent and discriminant analysis with a sample of 226 workers. The final scale had 12 items in a structure with 3 factors (composite reliability > .70) and explained variance of 65.6%. The study proposes an integration of the literature on ethical, counterproductive and work performance behavior and presents results that indicate the scale’s suitability for use in future research.

Keywords

• ethical behavior
• unethical behavior
• work
• scale