مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Organizational ethical climate (OEC) reflects the shared perceptions held by employees regarding the organization’s norms, policies, practices and procedures. According to the variety of these perceptions, Martin and Cullen (2006) distinguish among benevolent, principled, and egoistic ethical climates. Research efforts to understand the different outcomes associated with the three OECs have shown that OEC is associated with such desired organizational outcomes as job satisfaction (Wang, & Hsieh, 2012), organizational commitment (Erben, & Güneşer, 2008), and trust (DeConinck, 2011; Mulki, Jaramillo, & Locander, 2006). In an attempt to consolidate this substantial knowledge on the outcomes of OEC, several influential studies have recently pointed out a number of important theoretical gaps to be addressed by future research (Martin & Cullen, 2006; Mayer, Kuenzi, & Greenbaum, 2009; Simha & Cullen, 2012; Mayer, 2014).

In light of those studies, we highlight here the shortcomings of the extant literature on OECs’ effects. Specifically, we focus on the effects of OECs on a key dimension of organizational life, that is, organizational trust. Indeed, even if organizational trust is increasingly recognized as an essential coordinating mechanism among colleagues, units, and functions within organizations (e.g. Schoorman, Mayer, & Davis, 2007), and an important prerequisite for organizational success (Audi, 2008), the current evidence on its association with OEC has three basic shortcomings: the literature is scarce, fragmented, and (like other OEC-related studies) under-theorized. As evidence for its scarcity, the above-cited comprehensive reviews have identified only three articles that have studied organizational trust as a consequence of OECs (i.e., DeConinck, 2011; Mulki et al., 2006; Ruppel & Harrington, 2000). As evidence for its fragmentation, these studies are characterized by a focus on a specific type of OEC and on a specific trust referent. For instance, Ruppel and Harrington (2000) focus on egoistic and benevolent OECs as predictors of trust in the organization, while the studies of DeConinck (2011) and Mulki et al. (2006) show that benevolent OEC is associated with trust in supervisors. Such a narrow focus is a key limitation recognized by the recent research on trust, which today increasingly explores the effects of a single (trust) antecedent on trust in different referents (Fulmer & Gelfand, 2012, p. 1192). Moreover, the study by Ruppel and Harrington (2000) focused on IT managers, DeConinck (2011) studied salespersons, whereas Mulki et al. (2006) conducted their fieldwork among healthcare employees, which may constraint the impact of their findings to the specific occupational groups that they studied. The third shortcoming broadly attributed to OEC literature is that the consequences of ethical climates on various outcomes are often under-theorized. In this regard, Mayer, 2014 (p. 436) has recently argued that “there is little theory provided for why ethical climate should be associated with various outcomes”.

In order to address the three above-mentioned limitations (i.e., scarcity, fragmentation,, and under-theorization), we develop two sets of hypotheses. First, we develop a set of baseline hypotheses about the positive effects of benevolent and principled OECs, and negative effects of egoistic OEC on trust in colleagues, in the supervisor, and in the organization. Second, drawing on Attribution Theory (Weiner, 1986) and Social Exchange Theory (Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005), we develop a set of specific hypotheses about the comparative effects that the three types of OEC (egoistic, benevolent, and principled) have on trust in three key referents, that is, colleagues, the supervisor, and the employing organization. We test the hypotheses on a large-scale and probabilistic sample – based on gender, age, area, industrial sector and occupation – of 6000 employees in six European countries. To this end, we have applied partial least squares (PLS) regression, which is a widely used structural equation modeling technique increasingly employed in management research (Carrión, Henseler, Ringle, & Roldán, 2016).