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ABSTRACT. Corporate America is institutionalizing ethics through a variety of structures, systems, and processes. This study sought to identify managerial perceptions regarding the institutionalization of ethics in organizations. Eighty-six corporate-level marketing and human resource managers of American multinational corporations responded to a mail survey regarding the various implicit and explicit ways by which corporations institutionalize ethics. The results revealed that managers found ethics to be good for the bottom line of the organizations, that they did not perceive the need for additional formalization of ethics, and that they perceived implicit forms of institutionalizing ethics (e.g., leadership, corporate culture, top management support) to be more effective than the explicit forms of institutionalizing ethics (e.g., ethics officers, ethics committees, ethics newsletters). Implications of the survey and future research directions conclude the paper.
Introduction
Business ethics is a widely debated topic in corporate America. Incidents such as the Bhopal gas tragedy, the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and various insider trading scandals on Wall Street have brought the issue of ethics to the forefront of everybody's agenda. Newspapers, magazines, and prime-time television have devoted much time and space to the various ethical improprieties of organizations in the public, private, and third sectors. In the last few years, the number of ethical scandals has increased. Whitewater investigations continue to be front-page news; major corporations such as Philip Morris, General Motors, and Dow Corning have been called upon recently to defend their ethical integrity regarding product safety information.
Given this intense public scrutiny, it is not surprising that organizations have tried to institutionalize ethics through a variety of structures, policies, and procedures. Although the institutionalization of ethics has become popular in Corporate America, there is a lack of research in this area (Laczniak and Inderrieden, 1987; Weeks and Nantel, 1992); instead of studying the various methods by which corporations are trying to instill values, academicians have been more interested in proposing new theories and models of ethical decision making. For example, in the last ten years at least seven new comprehensive models (e.g., Bommer et al., 1987; Ferrell and Gresham, 1985; Hunt and Vitell, 1986; Jones, 1991; Trevino, 1987; Vitell et al., 1993; Whalen et al., 1991) have been proposed which are ready to be tested. All these models have...