People who cheat on their married partners are more likely to engage in professional misconduct, a new study has revealed.
The study dubbed as ‘Personal Infidelity and Professional Conduct in 4 settings,’ by University of Texas showed that cheaters were more than twice as likely to engage in corporate misconduct.
The researchers investigated four study groups totaling 11,235 individuals using data on police officers from the Citizens Police Data Project, data on financial advisers from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority BrokerCheck database, data on defendants in SEC cases from the Securities and Exchange Commission’s litigation release archives, and data on CEOs and CFOs from Execucomp.
“This is the first study that’s been able to look at whether there is a correlation between personal infidelity and professional conduct. We find a strong correlation, which tells us that infidelity is informative about expected professional conduct,” said Samuel Kruger the co-author of the research.
Even after matching misconduct professionals to misconduct-free individuals with similar ages, genders and experiences and controlling for a wide range of executive and cultural variables, the researchers found that people with histories of misconduct were significantly more likely to have affairs.
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This suggest a strong connection between people’s actions in their personal and professional lives and provide support for the idea that eliminating workplace sexual misconduct may also reduce fraudulent activity.
“Our results show that personal sexual conduct is correlated with professional conduct. Eliminating sexual misconduct in the workplace could have the extra benefit of contributing to more ethical corporate cultures in general,” added Kruger.
