Corporate Ethical Culture: Review of Literature and Introducing PP Model

Abstract

Abstract Companies can be identified as ethical or unethical companies based on their ethical culture. The corporate culture suggests that organizations have identifiable cultures such as ethical culture. Corporate ethical culture is the shared beliefs about ethics of an organization's members. Although corporate ethical culture is an important concept in organizational-individuals based studies in business, management and accounting, it does not have even an accepted and unified definition. The purpose of this paper is to find out how corporate culture and especially corporate ethical culture has been studied by reviewing how authors defined and studied corporate ethical culture. Two questions are guided this article: 1) How is corporate ethical culture defined by prior researchers? 2) What are the purposes for studying corporate ethical culture? This paper also presents different models of corporate ethical culture developed by prior researchers to find out what is the current position of corporate ethical culture in the literature.