From Preaching to Behavioral Change: Fostering Ethics and Compliance Learning in the Workplace

Journal of Business Ethics · 2020 · Volume 162 · Issue 4

Abstract

Despite the increasing inclusion of ethics and compliance issues in corporate training, the business world remains rife with breaches of responsible management conduct. This situation indicates a knowledge–practice gap among professionals, i.e., a discrepancy between their knowledge of responsible management principles and their behavior in day-to-day business life. With this in mind, this paper addresses the formative, developmental question of how companies’ ethics and compliance training programs should be organized in a manner that enhances their potential to be effective. Drawing on both the qualitative analysis of existing ethics and compliance training and the conceptual literature on behavioral ethics, a framework is proposed that consecutively aligns various types of training into a comprehensive ethics and compliance training program. The strengths and limitations of the suggested framework are discussed.

Keywords

Business ethics, Responsible management learning, Ethics training, Employee training, Ethical employee behavior, Compliance

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