Does it Pay to Be Ethical? Examining the Relationship Between Organisations’ Ethical Culture and Innovativeness

The Relationship Between Ethical Organisational Culture and Organisational Innovativeness: Comparison of Findings from Finland and Lithuania

“…In this respect, our study lends cross-cultural support to the research in Finland on the impact of ethical organisational culture on organisational innovativeness (Riivari and Lämsä, 2014;Riivari et al, 2012). Moreover, it indicates the crucial importance of congruency of management, discussability and clarity for enhancing a public organisation's capability to innovate, in particular, at behaviour and process levels in both socio-cultural contexts.…”

“…Moreover, they can encourage employees to be innovative by displaying role model behaviour, fostering a culture of learning and dialogue by giving feedback and asking for advice from specialists, hence, encouraging process and behaviour innovativeness. Empirical research on the interrelations between different virtues of the CEV model and dimensions of organisational innovativeness in Finland has yielded positive results (Riivari et al, 2012;Riivari and Lämsä, 2014). These authors demonstrate that congruency of management affects organisational innovativeness and, in particular, behaviour, process and strategy innovativeness.…”

“…The questionnaire in Finland was available as an e-survey to all employees (Riivari and Lämsä, 2014). The questionnaire in Lithuania was distributed as an e-survey after having contacted the top management and posting the link to the communication department for its further dissemination to the employees.…”

“…deviation). At this point, a short comment about some differences of the Finnish data analysed in this paper and the one published in the Journal of Business Ethics (Riivari and Lämsä, 2014) has to be made. In the mentioned paper, the variables of discussability and sanctionability were calculated as averages, which were arithmetically rounded for the statistical analysis.…”

“…This gap has been addressed in recent studies by Riivari et al (2012), Riivari and Lämsä (2014), who have found a positive interrelation between ethical organisational culture and organisational innovativeness. Their studies were carried out in the Finnish society, which is strongly dominated by values of accountability, equality, trustworthiness, honesty and justice (Helkama and Seppälä, 2006;Lämsä and Viljanen, 2014).…”