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Recent high-profile ethical scandals in start-up organizations have made people wonder whether entrepreneurship may cultivate a work environment with less emphasis on ethics. This study examined a psychological process about how an organization’s entrepreneurial orientation (EO) can affect its treatment of probationary employees, a vulnerable yet understudied group of workers.

The authors recruited 241 participants through Amazon Mechanical Turk. They answered an online survey about their experiences as probationary employees.

This study found that job feedback and meaning moderated the relationship between EO and ethical climate, such that this relationship was statistically significant and positive only among participants who reported high levels of feedback and job meaning. Ethical climate, in turn, was found to be related to a reduction in workplace incivility experienced by probationary employees. The indirect effect of EO on incivility via ethical climate was contingent on job feedback and meaning.

This study extends the discussion on the entrepreneurial context, adds to EO literature with findings on its indirect effect on nonfinancial performance and reinforces institutional theory through job characteristics’ moderating roles. However, a methodological limitation is conducting a cross-sectional single-source survey due to limited access to firms and probationary employees, considering the hidden population involved.

This study found no evidence of probationary employee exploitation in high EO organizations. Job seekers should embrace probationary work at start-ups. Entrepreneurial leaders should balance being proactive, innovative and caring toward employees.

It is debatable whether entrepreneurship leads to unethical organizational conduct. By studying a vulnerable group of employees, the authors discovered that EO, when paired with favorable job design factors, can create a more ethical workplace where temporary talents are treated with dignity and respect.

The need for entrepreneurs to engage in guerrilla behavior is heavily emphasized by entrepreneurship educators and practitioners. Yet such behavior often has serious ethical implications. The purpose of this study is to establish an assessment framework that provides ethical guidance to entrepreneurs engaged in guerrilla behaviors. A theoretical foundation for assessing the ethics of guerrilla behavior is established. The entrepreneurial context and how it gives rise to the need for guerrilla actions are examined. The guerilla concept is explored and criteria are outlined for labeling a given action or approach as being guerrilla in nature. Different forms or types of guerrilla approaches are introduced. Five primary ethical dimensions to be considered in evaluating a given guerrilla approach are identified. Examples are provided of how these dimensions can be applied to assess the ethics of three different successful guerrilla campaigns. An integrated matrix is introduced for use in evaluating guerrilla campaigns that consider our ethical dimensions together with leading theoretical perspectives on ethical action. Based on how a given guerrilla approach is scored when using the assessment matrix, conclusions are drawn for its appropriateness. By using a mix of the deontological, utilitarian and virtue-based frameworks, it becomes possible to determine the relative ethics of any given guerrilla action once implemented, and actions can be taken to either modify or abandon the action. Further, the concepts developed in this paper can be useful in ensuring new guerrilla actions are more ethical when they are first conceptualized or designed. Four design elements can be systematically applied to decisions that unfold as the guerrilla action is being formulated: resources and providers, disclosure, stakeholder effects, and inferences/conclusions. A number of suggestions for ongoing research are provided based on the work presented here.