The institutionalization of ethics is an important task for today's organizations if they are to effectively counteract the increasingly frequent occurrences of blatantly unethical and often illegal behavior within large and often highly respected organizations. This article discusses the importance of institutionalizing organizational ethics and emphasizes the importance of several variables (psychological contract, organizational commitment, and an ethically-oriented culture) to the institutionalization of ethics within any organization.... institutionalizing ethics may sound ponderous, but its meaning is straightforward. It means getting ethics (...) formally and explicitly into daily business life. It means getting ethics into company policy formation at the board and top management levels and through a formal code, getting ethics into all daily decision making and work practices down the line, at all levels of employment. It means grafting a new branch on the corporate decision tree — a branch that reads right/wrong (Purcell and Weber, 1979, p. 6). (shrink)

The United States Sentencing Commission has issued a call to academic researchers to examine how ethics/compliance programs impact the ethical climate of organizations. This is important to marketing practitioners and academics, because of the relationships between ethical climate and internal marketing related outcomes revealed by past empirical and conceptual research. This research examines these two questions: what is the relationship between ethics/compliance training and level of ethical climate, and what is the relationship between level of ethical climate and levels of (...) intra-firm trust, organizational market orientation, and employee commitment to quality? The findings do not support a significant relationship between ethics/compliance training and level of ethical climate in the time frame allocated for this study. The findings do indicate a significant and positive relationship between level of ethical climate and the levels of intra-firm trust, organizational market orientation, and employee commitment to quality. Higher levels of ethical climate are associated positively with higher levels of intra-firm trust, market orientation, and employee commitment to quality. (shrink)