The Influence Of Coporate Codes Of Ethics On Ethical Climate And Unethical Behavior

Integrating ethics in management and implementing ethical management is the frontier research subject among the current management area and scholars. Stakeholders not only pay attention to the organization’s business performance, have begun to pay attention to the ethics of enterprises. In recent years, business that went against the ethics in the commercial sector occurs frequently which caused serious damages to the society, making more people begin to think about causes of these behaviors, including the reasons and results of the behavior. More and more management scholars study the factors influencing ethical elements related to the organization. Construction of ethics has become an important part of business ethics. Codes of ethics as one of the paths of construction of ethics, has become a research focus of scholars at home and abroad. Many scholars propose that managers set set up moral standards for subordinates, and what they do and say will affect the staffs’ cognition and behavior. But there are few researches about how codes of ethics affect organizational ethical climate and the unethical behaviors is few. How the ethics cognition of managers paly a role in the process is need more empirical studies.Based on this background, the purpose of this paper is to study the influence of the code of ethics on organizational ethical climate and unethical behavior, and the role of ethics cognition of managers play in the process. Review on previous research literature about codes of ethics, ethics cognition, organizational ethical climate and unethical behavior. According to the literature review, this paper puts forward research model and hypothesis.In the empirical research, this study adopts the method of questionnaire survey. Questionnaires were distributed to the staff of many large companies in Hangzhou.197valid questionnaire samples were collected. Mainly using SPSS software to conduct reliability analysis, validity analysis, Pearson correlation analysis, regression analysis. The results were as follows:1. The existence, the communication frequency and communication quanlity of codes of ethics between organizational ethical climate has significant correlation;2. Communication quanlity of codes of ethics generates a negative effect on unethical behavior; 3.existence*communication quanlity, content*communication quanlity and communication frequency*communication quanlity are both significantly negative with the unethical behavior at the0.10level;4. Ethics cognition of managers has significant positive effect on organizational ethical climate, but shows no significant relationship with unethical behavior;5. Ethics cognition of managers’plays a intermediary role in the process of codes of ethics affectuing organizational ethical climate;6. Ethics cognition of managers’mediates the process of communication quanlity effecting on unethical behavior. The discussion of the results is presented. At last, we discussed the significance and limitations of this study.