Shambhavi Tiwari defends her PhD thesis

Title

‘Individual and social predictors of ethical and moral behavior'.

Time and place

28th January 2022 at 2 pm.

The defence will take place online on Zoom. Click here to participate. Passcode: 951634.

Assessment committee

  • Associate Professor Paul Maurice Conway, University of Copenhagen, Denmark (chair)

  • Professor Tanja Bipp, Universität Heidelberg, Germany

  • Associate Professor Tunde Ogunfowora, University of Calgary, Canada

Supervisor

  • Professor Ingo Zettler, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract

This PhD thesis investigates individual and social predictors of ethical behaviour in an organizational and societal context. The thesis consists of three manuscripts elaborating on ethics in organizations and the role of leadership, personality traits and its influence on risk preferences and prosocial behaviour, specifically, cooperative behaviour in intergroup relations within a complex societal structure, namely, the Indian society. All three manuscripts comprise empirical research, including systematic literature reviews and quantitative experimental and online surveys. As part of the thesis, a hierarchical five-factor model of ethical leadership and a corresponding assessment tool was developed. Further, personality trait D (dark factor) was found to be linked to several types of risk-taking; however, the intergroup identity variable ‘caste’ had no significant impact on cooperative behaviour in the Indian sample. Overall, this thesis provides pre-registered, well-powered studies and experiments highlighting short-term novel insights in the study of normative or moral behaviour at a societal and organizational level and important directions for future work.