Much have been published about students cheating in higher education. Studies presented cover different theoretical areas, from psychology and criminology to philosophy and pedagogy. Some of these studies suggest that cheating students tend to develop into workforce with various kinds of unethical behaviour. For a sustainable working life, it is important that managers and workforce have a compass that leads them to behave ethically. This study, therefore, takes a deeper look into the area of ethics to find different aspects of ethics related to students cheating, working life and organisations. The contribution aims at creating academic knowledge about (un)ethical management in working life. We do this by conducting a systematic literature review about what cheating in higher education entails for working life and management. We use literature that has been initiated covering academic research published in peer-reviewed journals.
First the material was collected. This was done by conducting a search in Scopus which resulted in a total of 673 articles. For this search we used the search string; ethic* AND (work* OR student*) AND (dishonest* OR cheat*). In a first sorting out, these articles were narrowed down to 352 articles about ethics and cheating from the perspective of the student or workforce. A second reading of the articles resulted in a reduced sample of articles studying cheating in higher education and working life, management, workforce, and co-worker including. Including words were student, professional, organization, company, authority, and leader. To sort the articles from the search we used Zotero as a tool.
In the study we present descriptive data about the selected literature and categorize different perspectives used in the review literature. The article concludes with suggestions on policy recommendations and suggestions for future research.