A new study, soon-to-be published in the Journal of Business Ethics , finds that most major corporations that have formal "ethics" programs are only "going through the motions."
Gary Weaver, University of Delaware, Linda Kelbe Trevino and Philip L. Cochran, Pennsylvania State University's Smeal College of Business Administration, collaborated on a two-year study of the structure of ethics programs created by Fortune 500 industrial and 500 service corporations.
Weaver, Trevino and Cochran surveyed corporations asking who has formal responsibility for ethics management, how ethics offices are structured, how companies evaluate the effectiveness of their programs and how actively CEOs encourage ethical behavior.
Ninety-eight percent of the 254 responding companies had some kind of ethics code or policy in place but while "some organizations are doing a good and thorough job, there's reason to believe that many companies' ethics policies and programs are superficial, Weaver said.
"When you look at what they're doing, there's not much follow-up," he said.
For example, although 137 of the responding firms formally assigned ethics responsibilities to a single officer, more than half said the officer spends 10 percent or less of his or her time on ethics issues. Only 19 corporations had ethics officers who devoted more than 90 percent of their time to ethics.
Slightly more than half the responding companies have a telephone call-in system for receiving ethics questions and complaints but a quarter of those systems get no more than one call per 10,000 employees each month. Eighteen percent of those get 20 or more calls per month.
Researchers also found that, generally, CEOs make only a minimal effort to publicly endorse an official commitment to corporate ethics, with 46 percent sending only one company-wide ethics communiquÈ a year to employees. Only 46 percent said CEOs discuss ethics issues with ethics officers, and those only did so once or twice a year.
Contact:
University of Delaware
Barbara Garrison
(302) 831-1964
[email protected]
Gary Weaver
(302) 831-4568
[email protected]
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