A Study of the Effectiveness of Ethics Codes Awareness upon Social Incompatibility: The Intermediary Role of Internal Control Locus (Case Study: Teachers in Yazd)

The present research aimed to study the effectiveness of ethics codes awareness upon social incompatibility considering the intermediary role of internal control locus. For this purpose, 271 teachers (196 women and 75 men) from high schools in Yazd in the school year of 2019-2020 were selected in a two-stage sampling process, the first of which involved stratified sampling, while clustering sampling was used for the second stage. The participants completed the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (Levenson et al., 1995), the questionnaire developed by Barnett and Valentine (2002) on ethics code awareness and Dubois’s internal control locus questionnaire (1997). In order to test the model proposed by this research, confirmatory factor analysis and the structural equation modeling in software packages LISREL and SPSS were used. Thus, the model proposed by the research proved to be fit (X2/DF = 2.53, RMSEA = 0.079). The findings obtained from the structural equations indicated ethics codes awareness along with the intermediary role of the internal control locus to have a negative and significant effect upon social incompatibility. Moreover, ethics codes awareness exerts a positive and significant effect upon the internal control locus, while the internal control locus brings about a negative and significant effect upon social incompatibility. The results pointed out that incompatible individuals, due to their particular qualities, defy organizational ethical codes, a defiance indicative of individual irresponsibility in regard to organizational ethics – a quality an individual with internal control locus enjoys. Therefore, it is obvious that such individuals defy organizational ethics codes.