THE EFFECT OF ETHICAL SIGNALS ON RECRUITMENT ...

subsequent results) were not on a continuum, but were trichotomous variables. This is
inconsistent with the literature on ethics, which suggests that ethical actions are not
necessarily “ethical” or “unethical,” but may lie somewhere in the middle.
Another limitation is that I did not have an alpha for the CMD scale. Due to the
complexity of the scoring, the data was scored by The Center for the Study of Ethical
Development at the University of Alabama. As a result, I was unable to calculate a
separate Cronbach’s alpha for these items and was forced to rely on what previous
researchers had reported.
A final limitation is the ordering of the manipulations (i.e., 1). performance, 2).
organizational practices, and 3). recruitment practices). This might have biased the
results due to anchoring bias (i.e., the participants read about poor performance first and
were not attracted; thus, the other manipulations did not matter as much). One way to
test this in future research is to change the order of manipulations so that they are
randomly assigned.
Future researchers should continue to conduct research on ethics and recruitment
in the laboratory. Specifically, it would be interesting to empirically test how important
ethics is when compared to other variables known to affect recruitment outcomes (i.e.,
salary, location, etc.). Future research would also benefit from more a more realistic
presentation of the data in the laboratory. For example, new technology allows for the
creation of realistic corporate web sites to be used to provide ethical information to
participants. Although the scenario in this study was based on a real organization, future
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