Chapter 2: Ethics Institutionalization and Its Impact on Quality of Work Life and Employee Job-Related Outcomes: A Review With Managerial and Research Implications

The revelations about ethical misconduct in business in the last 2 decades brought about a heightened interest in business ethics among academics and the public at large. Because of this, many firms began to institutionalize ethics in an attempt to address these issues. How effective is ethics institutionalization to organization performance and outcomes? Studies generally indicate that different aspects of ethics institutionalization can have a positive impact on managers’ ethical decisions. The focus of this chapter, however, is on the impact of ethics institutionalization on the employees’ jobrelated well-being. First, we discuss the ethics institutionalization construct – its conceptualization, its measurement, and its impact on different aspects of employees’ job-related well-being. Second, we discuss key job-related well-being constructs (namely, quality of work life, organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and esprit de corps). Finally, we address the research implications related to links between various forms of ethics institutionalization and employee-organizational and employee-life outcomes. Last, we highlight managerial implications of this research.