Not quite. The idea that corporate employees are fundamentally "not average" and therefore more prone to unethical behaviour than the general population relies on a dispositional explanation (it's about the person's character).

However, the vast majority of psychological research over the last 80 years heavily favours a situational explanation (it's about the environment/system). Everyone (in the field) got really interested in this after WW2 basically, trying to understand how the heck did Nazi Germany happen.

TL;DR: research dismantled this idea decades ago.

The Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments are the most obvious examples. If you're not familiar:

Milgram showed that 65% of ordinary volunteers were willing to administer potentially lethal electric shocks to a stranger because an authority figure in a lab coat told them to. In the Stanford Prison experiement, Zimbardo took healthy, average college students and assigned them roles as guards and prisoners. Within days, the roles and systems set in place overrode individual personality.

The other relevant bit would be Asch’s conformity experiments; to whit, that people will deny the evidence of their own eyes (e.g., the length of a line) to fit in with a group.

In a corporate setting, if the group norm is to prioritise KPIs over ethics, the average human will conform to that norm to avoid social friction or losing their job, or other realistic perceived fears.

Bazerman and Tenbrunsel's research is relevant too. Broadly, people like to think that we are rational moral agents, but it's more accurate to say that we boundedly ethical. There's this idea of ethical fading that happens. Basically, when you introduce a goal, people's ability to frame falls apart, including with a view to the ethical implications. This is also related to why people under pressure default to less creative approaches to problem solving. Our brains tunnel vision on the goal, to the failure of everything else.

Regarding how all that relates to modern politics, I'll leave that up to your imagination.

That sounds like classic sour grapes to me. "The reason I'm not successful is because I'm ethical!". Instead of you know, business being a hard field.