Abstract
AbstractEthical misconduct and violations seriously harm individuals and organizations and lead to massive fines or the dismissal of employees and CEOs. Many firms have implemented ethics programs to prevent unethical behavior but these are often ineffective and take a traditional approach. Ethics officers are often responsible for running and developing ethics programs, in collaboration with other departments. They can, therefore, play a key role in improving ethics program effectiveness. We postulate that ethics officers need to adopt a more innovative approach in order to achieve ethical behavior among employees and managers, and that such an innovative approach requires certain personality traits. This study investigates how ethics officers’ personality traits and innovative work behaviors relate to the effectiveness of ethics programs and normative ethical behavior through an online questionnaire conducted among 110 ethics officers in large Dutch organizations. Structural equations modeling showed that innovative work behavior mediated the relationship between ethics officers’ openness to experience and ethics program effectiveness which, in turn, is related to more normative ethical behavior. Future research must examine the (partial) mediation effects, including other characteristics of ethics officers in relation to ethics program effectiveness and ethical behaviors at work, and replicate the study multi‐nationally.
Highlights
In January 2017, Rolls Royce agreed to pay a £671 million fine to the British, American, and Brazilian authorities because of corruption, false accounting, and failure to prevent bribery (Skapinker, 2017)
The Cronbach's alpha and the confidence intervals (CI) were as follows: openness to experience: 0.74; conscientiousness: 0.79; innovative work behavior: 0.87; ethics program effectiveness: 0.89; and normative ethical behavior: 0.81
Little attention has been paid to the personality and innovative work behavior of ethics officers
Summary
In January 2017, Rolls Royce agreed to pay a £671 million fine to the British, American, and Brazilian authorities because of corruption, false accounting, and failure to prevent bribery (Skapinker, 2017). While Kaptein's (2009) definition refers to broad organizational systems, Beeri et al (2013) focus on an organization's managers and employees Both definitions shed light on different aspects and purposes of ethics programs which, essentially, stimulate ethical conduct pro-actively through raising awareness of and giving support to solving ethical issues on the work floor. Ethics officers are responsible for implementing innovative change practices, provide resources for ethical decision-making and improve the effectiveness of the ethics program (Beeri et al, 2013). In order to come up with new ethics program practices, and to implement such innovations, ethics officers may need to display behaviors that fall outside their traditional task performance domain (Rank, Nelson, Allen, & Xu, 2009). : Hypothesis 4 An ethics officer's conscientiousness is negatively related to innovative work behavior
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