Employees evaluate the fairness or justice of their workplace: Does one get what one deserves at work? Organizational scholars consider perceived workplace fairness to be a relevant factor in predicting and explaining organizational misbehavior. For instance, Treviño and Weaver found in their study that the more employees perceive that their organization is just, the less they perceive their colleagues to be engaged in behavior that harms the organization. This hypothesis was retested with an alternative measure of organizational misbehavior in 19 Flemish governmental organizations, and confirmation was found. Moreover, the effect holds when controlling for integrity policy, leadership, tenure, and gender.
Purpose – Police officers are frequently confronted with moral dilemmas in the course of their job. The authors assume new police officers need guidance, and need to be taught at the police academy how to deal with these situations. The purpose of this paper is to obtain insight into the impact of socialization on police recruits’ knowledge of the code of ethics and their moral reasoning skills. Design/methodology/approach – The study applied a longitudinal mixed methods design, using two methods. The first method was a qualitative observation of integrity training sessions at five police academies in Belgium. The second method was a quantitative survey-measurement of recruits’ knowledge of the code of ethics and their moral reasoning skills at three points in time: the beginning of their theoretical training, before their field training and afterwards. Findings – The analyses show differences between the police academies in their integrity training sessions. Some of these differences are reflected in different levels of knowledge of the code of ethics. As for the development pattern of recruits’ moral reasoning skills, the study found almost no differences between the academies. Perhaps this is because recruits already have relatively high scores when they start, leaving little room for improvement during the one year training program. This suggests an important role of the police selection procedure. Originality/value – Previous research on socialization and police culture has focussed on recruits being socialized in a negative police culture where misconduct is learned. This is a negative interpretation of police integrity. A positive one refers to ethical decision making generally, and moral reasoning specifically. The impact of the socialization process on recruits’ moral reasoning is empirically understudied.
This chapter starts out with a review of existing evaluation research on ethics training. This not only generates some useful insights but also reveals some important methodological and theoretical problems. As for the latter, specifications of the main variables are often vague, resulting in equally vague hypotheses, difficult to falsify or corroborate. The chapter hopes to address these concerns by proposing a conceptualization of both the independent variable, 'ethics training', and dependent variable, 'ethical competence'. These could constitute the main building blocks for a conceptual framework that can be used for cumulative evaluation research of very different ethics training programs with various training objectives.
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