조직의 윤리 풍토와 조직 구성원 직무 결과간의 관계에 대한 교차수준 연구

초록

With the increasing importance of business ethics and corporate social responsibility, a growing body of research has investigated the linkage between ethical climate and employee work outcomes. However, past research on ethical climate has mainly examined ethical climate at the individual level of analysis. Given that ethical climate itself is an organizational level construct, it may need to be measured and analyzed at the organizational level. To this end, this study aimed at exploring the relationship between organizational ethical climate and employee work outcomes from a cross-level perspective. Drawing on ethical climate literature, we identified law and ethics climate, community-focused climate, efficiency climate, obedience-to-authority climate as four key climates that reflect the level of ethicality in an organization. We predicted that law and ethics and community-focused climates would be positively associated with individuals’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). On the other hand, we proposed negative relationships between efficiency and obedience-to-authority climates and the three work outcomes. Data were collected from 5,845 employees in 247 Korean companies that were recruited via stratified sampling based on firm size, industry, and location. The four types of ethical climate were measured with employees’ perceptions of each type of climate within their organization, and their responses were aggregated to the organizational level so that they could reflect the corresponding type of organizational climate. Aggregation statistics such as rwg, ICC(1), and ICC(2) indicated sufficient within-organization agreement as well as between-organization variability in the four types of ethical climate. The results of Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) analysis showed that law and ethics climate and community-focused climate were significant predictors of employees’ job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and OCB. In contrast, efficiency climate and obedience-to-authority climate were not associated with organizational commitment and OCB. Contrary to expectations, we found a significant positive relationship between efficiency climate and job satisfaction. These findings suggest that law and ethics climate and community-focused climate are more influential in predicting employees’ work outcomes than efficiency and obedience-to authority climates. The findings of the current study have implications for both theory and practice.

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