Where does ethical culture collide?

The set of formal and informal organizational systems, the codes, reward and sanction structures, authority relationships, norms, and leadership, that together make ethical or unethical conduct more or less likely. Trevino, Butterfield, and McCabe named and defined ethical culture this way in 1998 and argued it is a feature of the organization, not a matter of any one person's character. In their study an ethical-culture dimension predicted observed misconduct differently in firms that had a written code than in firms without one. This is the same underlying idea that Kaptein later broke into eight organizational virtues and that Schwartz recast as a small set of core elements: one construct that these traditions name and cut up in different ways.[1]

Unit

An organization's formal and informal control systems

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Survey items on codes, reward and sanction systems, norms, obedience to authority, and leadership

The same organizational quality, described as a set of virtues that an organization can hold to a greater or lesser degree. Kaptein's 2008 Corporate Ethical Virtues model, published explicitly as a measure of the ethical culture of organizations, breaks the construct into eight conditions: clarity of what is expected, the good example set by direct managers and by senior management (two virtues), the feasibility of behaving ethically, felt support for doing so, openness of information, room to discuss ethical matters, and the reliable rewarding of good conduct and sanctioning of bad. This is Trevino's control systems and Schwartz's core elements viewed as measurable virtues, the same referent under a different name and a different cut.[2]

Unit

An organization, scored on eight ethical virtues

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

The Corporate Ethical Virtues (CEV) scale, with multi-item subscales for each of the eight virtues

The same construct, reduced to the elements a firm needs to build and keep it. Schwartz's 2013 account of the ethical corporate culture, subtitled the core elements, argues that an ethical culture rests on a small set of shared core ethical values such as trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship, together with a formal ethics program and the steady example of ethical leadership. Where Trevino describes control systems and Kaptein counts eight virtues, Schwartz names the values and the supporting processes that produce the culture. The referent is the same organizational property, and the difference is which parts of it each account puts in the foreground.[3]

Unit

An organization's core ethical values and supporting processes

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Conceptual model, assessed through core-value statements, a formal ethics program, and leadership practices

Not ethical culture, but the construct it is chronically confused with, and the reason this page carries the jangle tag. Victor and Cullen defined the ethical climate in 1988 as the shared perceptions of what counts as ethically correct behavior and how ethical issues should be handled in an organization. Culture, in the traditions above, is the machinery of codes, virtues, values, and controls, while climate is the group's perception of the prevailing basis for ethical decisions. The two travel under near-identical names, are measured with overlapping items, and are often pooled into one ethical-context score, but a perception and the system that shapes it are not the same thing.[4]

Unit

A workgroup or organization, as its members perceive it

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

The Ethical Climate Questionnaire (ECQ): egoism, benevolence, and principle across three loci