Personal Characteristics and Corrupt Intention: The Moderating Role of Intense Facebook Attachment

Abstract

Corruption has been become a chronic and serious problems in many countries in the developing world. Corruption has been also spreading into many areas among public organizations. This phenomenon seriously diminishes and ruins the effective performance of public organizations. The personal characteristics of public officers are commonly blamed for the main cause of corruption wave in public organizations. The main objective of this empirical research is to investigate the relationship between some personal characteristics and corrupt intention base on the concept of public choice and planned behavioral theories. Additionally, the moderating effect of Facebook attachment on the correlation between personal characteristics and corrupt intention is also investigated. Despite the fact that it is empirical research and 600 public officers who have been working for public organization in Laos were selected as target samples and the data was collected by five-point Likert’ questionnaire form. Then the collected data was analyzed and interpreted based on the statistical functions of both IBM SPSS and AMOS. The findings revealed that legal enforcement awareness has a significant negative impact on corrupt intention. Conversely, corrupt intention is significantly and positively influenced by power value. Interestingly, it also found that intense Facebook attachment significantly dampens the positive relationship between security needs and corrupt intention. In fact, consuming news via facebook can significantly diminish the power of security need which is considered as the main cause of increasing corrupt intention. Finally, the research findings and implications are comprehensively discussed. Then research limitations are also identified and some significant suggestions for the future research are recommended respectively.