Chapter 11: Making Ethical Climate a Mainstream Management Topic: A Review, Critique, and Prescription for the Empirical Research on Ethical Climate

The plethora of corporate scandals in recent years at companies such as Enron, Tyco, and Worldcom has thrust the issue of busness ethics to center stage in the media and in the minds of many consumers. In the scientific literature, there is growing acceptance of the notion that corporate indiscretions are the result of more than just a few “bad apples” and that the organizational environment has a strong influence on employees' unethical behavior (Trevi ño, Weaver, & Reynolds, 2006). With the importance of the organizational context in mind, approximately 20 years ago Victor and Cullen (1987, 1988) introduced the concept of ethical climate to describe how the organizational environment impacts unethical behavior. Victor and Cullen (1987) define ethical climate as “the shared perception of what is correct behavior, and how ethical situations should be handled in an organization” (p. 51). A premise of this construct is that the social context in organizations plays a pivotal role in determining whether employees will behave unethically.