The influence of ethical blindness on organizational citizenship behavior in organizations

Workplaces are the places where an employee spends considerably amount of his/her working hours during daily time. Any factor during the process may affect the overall productivity, conformity of employee to his/her company. In addition to this, nowadays, growing number of companies show their interest in ethics. The emotional situations and attitudes of the employees tend to be changed before and after having been accepted into a specific position. Either these changes can be occured automatically or those changes might cause from having some blind spots. Ethical Blindness is a kind of situation that the employees act unethical in several conditions without being aware of it. There are three factors that constitute ethical blindness; these are, the rationalization, routinization and ambiguity factors. Therefore, Organizational Citizenship Behavior is the volunteerly contributions to the organization by employees. Organizational citizenship behavior has been analyzed in the literature in detail. In this research, the influence of Ethical Blindness regarding the constructing factors of rationalization, routinization and ambiguity factors on Organizational Citizenship Behavior has been studied. While measuring the influence of Ethical Blindness on Organizational Citizenship Behavior in organizations; for the Ethical Blindness section, the vignette method has been preferred. There were three vignettes including rationalization, routinization and ambiguity factors has been presented to the participants. They were asked to put themselves in the vignette's main character's position then evaluate the statements accordingly. In addition, for the Organizational Citizenship Behavior section, a scale developed by Basım and Şeşen (2006) has been preferred to use including five dimensions of OCB; altruism, conscientiousness, courtesy, civic virtue and sportsmanship dimensions.