THE EFFECT OF ETHICAL SIGNALS ON RECRUITMENT ...

“During the company information session, I heard or saw something that bothered me
from a moral viewpoint” [reverse], and “During the office visit, I heard about or
witnessed unethical activity by a company representative” [reverse]. Cronbach’s alpha
for this scale was .69. At Time 2, recruitment practices were measured with five items
(alpha = .87). A sample item is, “Given what I know now, I think the recruiter acted
ethically during the recruitment process.” Both scales were answered using a Likert
scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Items are listed in Appendix A.
Self-Importance of Moral Identity
Self-importance of moral identity was measured using the 10-item scale
developed by Aquino and Reed (2002). Participants were asked to read a list of 9-items,
and then respond to a series of statements on a scale of 1-5 (strongly disagree to strongly
agree). A sample statement is: “it would make me feel good to be a person who has
these characteristics.” The alpha for these ten items was .81.
Cognitive Moral Development
Cognitive moral development was measured using the Defining Issues Test,
Version 2 (DIT2), which is based on Kohlberg’s model and has been found to have an
alpha of .81 (Rest, Narvaez, Thoma, & Bebeau, 1999). The DIT2 has been advocated by
several researchers as a tool for measuring moral development of individuals (Weeks,
Loe, Chonko, Martinez, & Wakefield, 2006; Rest et al., 1999; Trevino, 1986). The
DIT2 consists of six stories or moral dilemmas and twelve statements related to these
stories. Participants were asked to rate the statements in terms of importance. Finally,
participants were then asked to select the four most important statements (from the
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