Believe what you will about spells to ward off evil spirits, but new research describes an easy way to ward off evil bosses.

Moral symbols — such as a religious poster hanging on a cubicle wall, or an ethically righteous quote embedded in the signature of an email — can keep employees from getting pulled into an employer’s dishonest business practices and can even discourage the employees’ superiors from engaging in nefarious acts, according to researchers from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.

Displaying moral symbols can offer protection against unethical requests, according to the study, which is scheduled to appear in the Academy of Management Journal.

“We want to empower people,” said Maryam Kouchaki, assistant professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, who co-wrote the study with Sreedhari Desai at UNC. “How can we behave such that we reduce these incidents and requests?”

Kouchaki and Desai conducted five laboratory tests and one survey to test their theory that exposure to moral symbols would reduce immoral behavior.

In one study, 148 college students were asked to play a decision-making game with prize money at stake. Participants were told they would be paired with two other team members — Pat and Sam — whom they would meet via email.

Some participants received an introductory email from Pat that included the morally themed quotation: “Better to fail with honor than succeed by fraud.” Others got an email from Pat with no quotation, and none of the emails from Sam contained a quote.

Each participant of Team 1 had to decide whether to send an honest or a deceptive message to Team 2 about whether a certain payment method would result in the most money for Team 2 — but with financial consequences for Team 1. The honest message would likely result in Team 1 losing $18, while the deceptive message would result in Team 1 losing just $3. Team 1 also had to decide who would deliver the message. Neither Team 2 nor the messenger would ever know if the message was deceptive.

The researchers found that participants were less likely to send a deceptive message if they had been exposed to Pat’s moral quote — 46 percent who had been exposed to the quote chose to send the deceptive message, versus 64 percent of people who had not been exposed to it. They also found that those who decided to send the deceptive message were far less likely to ask Pat to deliver it if they had received the moral quote — 23 percent of those who had received the quote sent Pat on the mission, versus 55 percent of those who had not.

Four other experiments yielded similar results.

To test the theory in real life, the researchers surveyed 104 pairs of bosses and subordinates from a variety of organizations in India, where religious icons are commonplace.

They found that subordinates who displayed moral symbols — such as pictures of Krishna, Buddha, Jesus or rosary beads — were more likely to be considered by their bosses to have high moral character and were less likely to have been asked to compromise their ethics at work, even when the supervisors were of a different religion.