Where does ethical climate collide?

The shared perceptions of what constitutes ethically correct behavior and how ethical issues should be handled in an organization, which is Victor and Cullen's 1988 definition and the origin of the construct. They built a typology by crossing three ethical criteria, egoism, benevolence, and principle, with three loci of analysis, individual, local, and cosmopolitan, yielding nine theoretical climate types. The Ethical Climate Questionnaire was written to recover them, and factor analyses returned five empirical types: caring, law and code, rules, instrumental, and independence. The referent is the group's perception of the prevailing basis for ethical decisions, not any individual's own ethics and not the organization's formal controls.[1][2]

Unit

A workgroup or organization, as its members perceive it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

ECQ items on egoism, benevolence, and principle across individual, local, and cosmopolitan loci; five empirical factors

Not ethical climate, but the construct it is chronically merged with. Trevino, Butterfield, and McCabe defined ethical culture in 1998 as the organization's formal and informal control systems, its codes, reward structures, norms, and leadership, that make ethical or unethical conduct more likely, and argued it is conceptually distinct from ethical climate. In their data an ethical-culture dimension was more strongly associated with observed unethical conduct in firms that had codes, while a climate dimension mattered more where no code existed. The two are measured with overlapping surveys, cited interchangeably, and often summed into one ethical-context score, which is the merger this page is about. Ethical climate is a perception of what is valued; ethical culture, in Trevino's meaning, is the machinery that does the valuing.[3]

Unit

An organization's formal and informal control systems

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Survey items on codes, reward systems, norms, and leadership; an ethical-culture dimension

A separate operationalization built for hospital nursing, not a translation of the Ethical Climate Questionnaire. Olson defined the ethical climate of a nursing work setting in 1998 as nurses' perceptions of the organizational conditions and practices bearing on how ethical issues are recognized, discussed, and decided, and measured it with the Hospital Ethical Climate Survey. The survey is organized by relationship, a nurse's dealings with peers, patients, managers, physicians, and the hospital, rather than by Victor and Cullen's criteria-by-loci grid. It carries the words ethical climate and shares the general idea, but its items, its structure, and its validation sample are its own, so its scores are not comparable to ECQ scores.[4]

Unit

A hospital unit's ethical environment, as its nurses perceive it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

HECS items on relationships with peers, patients, managers, physicians, and the hospital