Abstract
The current study examined the influence of materialism, job satisfaction, and perceived managerial trustworthiness on attitude towards fraudulent behaviors among finance officers of selected universities across the south-west, Nigeria. Therefore, it is hoped that this paper will help to reduce employees’ favorable disposition towards fraudulent behaviors within the Nigerian educational sector, especially among the finance officers of selected universities across south-west Nigeria. This paper adopted a quantitative research approach, as well as a cross-sectional research design. The empirical findings revealed that job satisfaction, materialism, and perceived managerial trustworthiness jointly and significantly influence attitude towards fraudulent behaviors. They all had a substantial main effect on attitude towards fraudulent behaviors among finance officers of designated universities across south-west Nigeria. Similarly, the current findings showed that among the six demographic factors (marital status, age, gender, the highest educational level, name of the university, and work experience) that significantly jointly influence attitude towards fraudulent behaviors; only gender, age, and marital status exhibited a significant independent (leading) influence on attitude towards fraudulent behaviors. Besides, this paper concluded that attitude towards fraudulent behaviors is a factor of how materialistic employees are, their level of satisfaction on the job, trust in their organization, gender, age, and marital status of the employees. Notably, this study is distinctive, as it significantly adds to knowledge concerning the appropriate management strategies of getting reorientation about materialism, increasing job satisfaction and managerial trust, which increases attitude towards fraudulent behaviors, specifically amongst the finance officers of designated universities across south-west Nigeria. Hence, the study highlighted the importance of materialism, job satisfaction, perceived managerial trustworthiness, gender, age, and marital status on attitude towards fraudulent behaviors.