Easy A's on the Internet

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The second study asked managers about work-related ethical dilemmas. Those managers who viewed themselves as "moral" tended to take the most extreme positions in posing solutions to the dilemma.

"There are no bounds to self-deception," Reynolds said in an interview. "You can think you're a good person and because you're a good person, you can do anything. That's not the case."

Reynolds says the research proves managers cannot take people for granted and that ethical training is vital. People need to be told over and over again, says Reynolds, what's acceptable and what's not.

Meanwhile, "Max" Howard Bazerman, the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School has found that people commonly predict they will behave more ethically than they actually do and even remember behaving more ethically than they did, according to a Harvard Business School working paper.

The findings Bazerman has collected about ethics show people tend to favor the "in" group over the "out" group, overly discount the future (e.g., says Bazerman, we continue to use aerosol cans even though we know it damages the atmosphere), claim excessive credit for our work, and fail to sufficiently notice ethical violations of others.

Bazerman, co-author of Negotiation Genius (Bantam, September, 2007), says he aims to demonstrate that the ethics problem in business isn't just the result of a few bad apples. He wants to raise people's actual ethics level to their perceived ethics level by making them aware of their behavior.

Evaluating Service Time Value

In the cold of winter a few years ago, Dilip Soman, the Chorus Professor of Strategy & Marketing at the University of Toronto's Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, accidentally stumbled on a new subject to study. He discovered his neighbor was upset because he had purchased a snow blower, and the store representative who came to assemble it finished in 15 minutes, which seemed too short a time for the price the neighbor had paid for the setup service.

This got Soman wondering whether longer service really means better service. He found that people used duration to measure quality when there was no way to measure output, simply because it was accessible and tangible. "The easier it is to measure something, the more likely it is people will use that as an evaluation," Soman said in an interview. But a longer duration of service doesn't necessarily mean you're getting a better deal. Sometimes, shorter service just means the service provider is more efficient.

The message for service provides is to highlight the value of efficiency to customers if the service is quick.

On the other hand, Soman found that if customers have to wait a long time for service to begin, the opposite is true: Customers want a shorter wait. Soman suggests starting the service as soon as possible by having customers fill out forms right away.

To come to these conclusions, Soman and his colleague Catherine Yeung from the University of Singapore conducted 12 studies that included 1,400 people, half of whom were in the field and half in the lab. The study was published in the August, 2007, issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

Hourly Wage Earners Volunteer Less

People who earn an hourly wage are less likely to volunteer their time than salaried workers, according to a recent study by two business-school professors.

Sanford DeVoe, assistant professor of Organizational Behavior & Human Resource Management at the Rotman School of Management, looked at the results of the 2003 American Time Use Survey compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which included 11,000 respondents, and interviewed 85 people. He found that those who earn hourly wages and therefore put a precise dollar amount on their time allow these expectations to spill into their personal time.

In other words, they volunteer less often than their nonwage counterparts. In fact, DeVoe, who partnered with Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford Graduate School of Business, found that hourly wage earners in the U.S. spent an average of 36% less time volunteering than salaried workers. And when salaried workers were asked to calculate their salary by the hour, they too were less willing to volunteer. In 2003, 59% of the U.S. workforce was paid by the hour—so the implications of the study—published in the August, 2007, issue of the Academy of Management Journal—for volunteerism are substantial.

Meanwhile, those who don't volunteer, DeVoe said in an interview, may be missing out on some intangible benefits. He believes volunteers are happier and healthier. "Volunteering has benefits that are hard to put a monetary value on," DeVoe says.

Di Meglio is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com in Fort Lee, N.J.