Background: Effective management of professional ethics requires in-depth study of the current state of professional ethics as well as the reasons for unethical behaviors and methods of ethics development. Therefore, researchers in this study tried to explore the life experiences of managers in order to identify the causes and consequences of unethical behaviors and strategies to control such behaviors.
Method: This research has been done with a mixed approach and descriptive-field method. The statistical population includes managers working in government organizations in Tehran and Semnan. Through purposeful sampling, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 28 managers. The interviews were coded using theme analysis. After the final editing, 104 concepts were organized based on consistency in the form of 8 categories and the categories were organized within three categories according to semantic homogeneity. Then, in order to prioritize the causes of immoral behaviors, based on the AHP method and using Expert Choice software, the causes were prioritized.
Results: The research findings show that the most important causes of unethical behaviors in the organization are: Attitude-based factors, needs-based factors, factors based on individual skills, factors based on organizational culture, factors based on organizational behaviors, Factors based on management processes and systems, socio-cultural environmental factors and technical-economic factors.
Conclusion: According to the results of this study, if managers want to improve the level of ethics in the organization, they should focus more on psychological factors.