Do cultural differences impact ethical issues? Exploring the relationship between national culture and quality of code of ethics

Abstract

In recent years, attention to sustainability and corporate ethics has grown considerably. This highlights ethical codes as tools to promote ethical and honest actions and create greater motivation among employees. Ethical codes help implement organisational control by allowing companies to represent both belief and boundary systems. Despite the global relevance of ethics, the drafting processes, and the contents of ethical codes differ considerably between countries. This circumstance makes interesting the analysis of the influence of national culture on the quality of the code of ethics, still little explored in the literature. This study aims to fill this gap by analysing the impact of Hofstede's dimensions, as an expression of national culture, on quality of the code of ethics, from an organisational control perspective. Our analysis, of 191 international companies belonging to 29 different countries and five continents, shows that the quality of the ethical codes is related to five of Hofstede's six dimensions. This study enriches the literature by extending the field of antecedents of the quality of the code of ethics, which before this research included analyses only on internal determinants.