SUPERVISORS' SELF-PERCEIVED SOCIAL CLASS AND ETHICS: A Cross-Cultural Analysis

We employed Robert Merton’s anomie theory to examine supervisors’ ethics. We examined whether supervisors with a lower self-perceived social class are more likely to justify ethically suspect behaviors than are those with a higher self-perceived social class and whether cultural values influence this individual-level association. The results did not show that supervisors’ self-perceived social class is able to predict their ethics. However, supervisors’ self perception of social class could explain their ethics under the influences of cultural values, and the statistical report indicated that assertiveness, in-group collectivism, future orientation, humane orientation and the importance of the economy exert a moderating effect on the individual-level relationship between supervisors’ self-perceived social class and ethics. The sample contained 11,728 supervisors from 28 countries.