Ethics Programs and Ethical Culture: A Next Step in Unraveling Their Multi-Faceted Relationship

Abstract

ethics program, ethical culture, virtue theory,

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

“…Previous studies lend support to the argument that the ethical culture of an organisation promotes positive organisational behaviour and the achievement of organisational outcomes (e.g. Treviño, 1990;Sinclair, 1993;Treviño et al, 1998;Kaptein, 2008Kaptein, , 2009Kaptein, , 2010Kaptein, , 2011Huhtala et al, 2011;Huhtala et al, 2012). For example, some empirical studies show that an organisation's ethical culture stimulates its managers' occupational well-being (Huhtala et al, 2011) and their commitment to organisational goals (Huhtala et al, 2012), and employees' willingness to report wrongdoing in an organisation (Kaptein, 2011).…”

The ethical culture of organisations and organisational innovativeness

“…Clarity receiving a high evaluation shows that the ethical standards of public authorities are clear and understandable for Finnish state organisation members. This result implies that communicating about and training in ethical standards in these organisations have been successful (Kaptein, 2009). The comparative study of the public-service ethics of EU member states by Moilanen and Salminen (2007, p. 45) signals a similar idea: the majority of public sector organisations in EU countries stress clear, specific and well-communicated values and standards.…”

“…In this study we define the ethical culture of an organisation drawing upon the Corporate Ethics Virtues Model (CEV), which formulates normative criteria with multiple dimensions for evaluating the ethical culture of organisations (Kaptein, 1998(Kaptein, , 2008(Kaptein, , 2009(Kaptein, , 2010. According to Kaptein (2008), the virtuousness of an organisation can be determined by the extent to which the culture of the organisation stimulates its members to act ethically and prevents them from acting unethically.…”

“…Although some studies of the ethical culture of organisations exist (e.g. Treviño, 1990;Sinclair, 1993;Treviño et al, 1998;Kaptein, 2008Kaptein, , 2009Kaptein, , 2010Kaptein, , 2011Huhtala et al, 2011), research on the topic is still in its early phase. The concept has been defined theoretically, and the validity of the construct has been tested empirically (Kaptein, 2008;Huhtala et al, 2011).…”

The Associations between Ethical Organizational Culture, Burnout, and Engagement: A Multilevel Study

“…When we tested the measurement model for all factors, we also investigated whether the different dimensions of ethical culture had specific, individual associations with the well-being outcomes; that is, whether some dimensions had residual variance that could not be explained by the factor of total ethical culture and if these residual variances had significant associations with burnout, work engagement and/or their subdimensions. This procedure is in line with the multi-dimensional structure of the CEV model, which acknowledges that although the dimensions form the overall ethical culture, the different dimensions may still have separate connections to different outcomes (see also Huhtala et al, 2011;Kaptein, 2009Kaptein, , 2011aKaptein, , 2011b. Third, we estimated a regression model for the hypothesized associations and tested whether the regression coefficients could be set equal across the within and between levels, following the statistical procedure for testing homology put forward by Chen, Bliese, and Mathieu (2005).…”