Comprehensive Overview of the Most Significant Notions Related to Unethical Work Behavior in Organizations

This article serves as a theoretical overview of the current theoretical concepts of unethical behavior in the organization. The most prominent studies were reviewed and their outcomes were reflected in this article. This paper considers a detailed research of theoretical concepts of unethical work behavior. This topic is explored well but the problem is that every researcher delineates unethical behavior in organization differently and this causes terms-related confusion with too many "labels" for the same phenomena (e.g. counterproductive behavior, deviant behavior, dysfunctional leadership and many others). First, this article seeks to critically clarify the basic terms used in the discourse in unethical behavior in organization. Secondly, article provides new classification and delineation of phenomena of unethical leadership and unethical employee behavior. In this article, it is differentiated between unethical leadership and unethical employee behavior. These two notions arc regarded a distinct for the purpose of theoretical clarification. Third, based on a thorough theoretical analysis, paper also categorize the terms used in the scientific discourse to pinpoint the diversity of the respective discourse and show various facets of the dark side of human behavior in organizations. In analysis, we used methods as extensive literature review on the topics of unethical work behavior, theoretical analysis of selected concepts of unethical work behavior, synthesis of current theoretical knowledge of studied phenomenon and consecutive delineation of a new approach to unethical work behavior.