The Ethics of Organizations:
A Longitudinal Study of the U.S. Working
Population
Muel Kaptein
ABSTRACT. The ethics of organizations has received
much attention in recent years. This raises the question of
whether the ethics of organizations has also improved. In
1999, 2004, and 2008, a survey was conducted of 12,196
U.S. managers and employees. The results show that the
ethical culture of organizations improved in the period
between 1999 and 2004. Between 2004 and 2008
unethical behavior and its consequences declined and the
scope of ethics programs expanded while ethical culture
showed no significant improvement during the same
period. The article concludes with a discussion of the
implications of these findings for future research and
practice.
KEY WORDS: ethical culture, ethics program, unethi-
cal behavior, ethical reputation, ethics management, vir-
tue theory, stakeholder theory
The ethics of organizations has received much
attention in recent years. New or revised laws and
regulations have been enacted to improve the ethics
of organizations, such as the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley
Act which was amended in 2004, the revised U.S.
Federal Sentencing Guidelines for Organizations of
2004, and the new rules the NYSE and NASDAQ
introduced in the wake of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and
U.S. Department of Justice have also increased their
enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,
which was introduced in 1977 and revised in 1997.
However, awareness and concern about the ethics
of organizations have grown also beyond the legal
domain. For example, ethical and sustainable invest-
ing in the U.S. increased from $639 billion in 1995 to
$2,159 billion in 1999 and from $2,290 billion in
2005 to $2,711 billion in 2007 (Social Investment
Forum, 2007). Job seekers and consumers also give
greater consideration to the ethics of organizations
(Harrison et al., 2005). For example, ethical con-
sumerism in the U.K. tripled between 1999 and 2006
(The Co-operative Bank, 2007) and 57% of U.S.
consumers currently say that their purchase decision
could be influenced by whether or not a product
supports a worthy cause (Nielsen, 2008). The number
of international non-governmental organizations that
scrutinize the ethics of organizations has increased
worldwide from 30,000 in 2000 to over 60,000 in
2007 (Union of International Associations, 2008).
And the ethics of organizations has also gained a more
prominent place in the curriculum of business
schools: the percentage of international business
schools that require students to take a course in
business ethics has increased from 34% in 2001 to 63%
in 2007 (The Aspen Institute, 2007).
Muel Kaptein, PhD, is Professor of Business Ethics and Integrity
Management at the Department of Business-Society Man-
agement at RSM, Erasmus University. His research interests
include the management of ethics, the measurement of ethics,
and the ethics of management. He has published articles in
journals like Academy of Management Review, Journal
of Business Ethics, Journal of Management, Journal of
Management Studies, Journal of Organizational Beha-
vior,andOrganization Studies. He is author of the books
Ethics Management: Auditing and developing the
ethical content of organizations (Springer, 1998), The
Balanced Company: A corporate integrity approach
(Oxford University Press, 2002), The Six Principles of
Managing with Integrity: A practical guide (Articulate
Press, 2005) and The Living Code: Embedding ethics
into the corporate DNA (Greenleaf, 2008). Muel is also
associate partner of KPMG Integrity, which he co-founded in
the Netherlands in 1996. More information can be found on
the website: www.muelkaptein@com.
Journal of Business Ethics (2010) 92:601–618 Ó Springer 2009
DOI 10.1007/s10551-009-0175-0