How Do We Do Things Here in Relation to Ethics?

Understanding how we do things “here” (inside an organization) is an important part of an individual’s socialization into, and acceptance by the members of, that organization. A core part of socialization is learning about the organization’s culture. An organization’s culture represents the set of beliefs, norms and practices that are shared by individuals inside an organization; in short, “how we do things here.”

Going a bit deeper, we can ask how do we do things here – inside an organization — with respect to ethics? From the viewpoint of ethics, an organization’s ethical culture can be viewed as a “slice“ of an organization’s overall culture, showing “how we do things around here in relation to ethics.” The ethics literature argues that an ethical organizational culture (EOC) consists of formal (e.g., code of ethics) and informal (e.g., norms, rituals) ethical components. These formal and informal components must be aligned and nurtured over time for an organization to develop and maintain a strong ethical culture.

A strong EOC can deter both intentional and unintentional dishonesty within organizations. For example, the 2023 Global Business Ethics Survey surveyed over 75,000 fulltime employees in 42 countries in 2022-2023 on the state of ethics and workplace compliance, finding that organizations with strong EOCs were nearly five times more likely to have a positive impact on employees’ ethical behaviors than organizations with weak ethical cultures. However, strong EOCs are in the minority; the survey also found that nearly 48% of employees viewed their organizations has having either weak or weak leaning EOCs.  The costs of weak EOCs can be high; for example, the estimated average annual losses in 2023 from organizational fraud committed by employees worldwide were 5% of total revenues, or 5 trillion dollars.

To study EOCs, ethics scholars have studied primarily domestic for-profit organizations using qualitative research methods. Little attention to date has been paid by ethics scholars to EOCs in other organizations such as multinational enterprises or international non-profit organizations.

At the same time, both the Academy of International Business (AIB) and the Academy of Management (AOM) have longstanding, well-established ethics committees, policies, and procedures. Many, if not most, of the formal EOC components studied in the EOC literature are already in place in both academic associations.

This suggests an intriguing possibility:

Given what we know about the formal and informal components of an EOC, what are the practical policy implications of the EOC literature for AIB’s and AOM’s journals, its leaders, and its members?  How do we do things here in relation to ethics? How strong are our current ethical cultures? And, given what we do, what could we do — AIB’s and AOM’s journal editors, leaders and members — to create stronger ethical cultures in our respective associations?

The purpose of the “Ethical Organizational Cultures in the Academy: Insights from our Business School, Journals, and Academic Associations” webinar was to address these questions. The webinar was proposed and co-sponsored by the Ethics Policy Committee (EPC) of the Academy of International Business (AIB) and the Ethics Education Committee (EEC) of the Academy of Management (AOM). Both the EPC and the EEC are responsible for ethics policies and procedures in their respective academic associations. The webinar was held on March 24, 2025, and can be accessed through the ethics pages at both AIB and AOM. For your convenience, the recording has also been embedded right here in this news post.

Participants in the webinar were (in order of presentation):

  • Sybille Sachs, University of Applied Sciences Zurich, AOM EEC Co-chair
  • Sharon Alvarez, University of Pittsburgh, AOM Past President And AOM Ethics Committee Chair
  • Linda Trevino, Penn State University, AOM Ethics Code Task Force and first Ethics Ombudsperson
  • Jennifer Eury, Penn State University, AOM EEC Member
  • Kathy Lund Dean, Gustavus Adolphus College, AOM EEC Member and EAC Member
  • Lorraine Eden, Texas A&M University, AIB EPC member and AOM EEC Member

We hope that you enjoy the webinar and will find many opportunities to use the event recording, and its accompanying slide deck, in group situations. Some possibilities are:

  • facilitating ethics discussions in doctoral and junior faculty consortia;
  • stimulating discussions of journal ethics at meetings of journal editors, editorial boards and paper development workshops;
  • thinking about leadership opportunities at the executive board level; and
  • as an ethics teaching aid in doctoral seminars.

Do remember to download the slide deck also. A reading list with weblinks is attached at the end of the slide deck.

Lorraine Eden
AIB Fellow, Professor Emerita of Management
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX