This research implies the relationships between organization's ethical climates, via operant ethical mechanism related with the perceived ethical climates, and the organizational effectiveness; such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and ...
This research implies the relationships between organization's ethical climates, via operant ethical mechanism related with the perceived ethical climates, and the organizational effectiveness; such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behaviors(OCB). The main focus was laid on the impacts of perceived ethical climates on organizational effectiveness, along with the operant ethical mechanism as its intermediate variable.
For this study, 4 IT specialized companies were selected to examine the relationships among the factors; 395 surveys were returned out of 600 surveys, 383 surveys were analyzed as validate samples exempting unreliable answers. The analysis used SPSS 12.0 and AMOS 5.0 for statistic program. Our results can be summarized as follows:
First, the influence of perceived ethical climates to job satisfaction appeared effective in general. All the sub-factors of ethical climates, such as care, social responsibility, rules and standards, influenced job satisfaction in a significant and positive way. We can conclude that the higher perception on ethical climates induces the higher job satisfaction.
Second, in the relationships between perceived ethical climates and organizational citizenship behaviors, the climates of care, rules and standards affected OCB, while the social responsibility climate did not influence significantly in organizational citizenship behaviors. This result showed that organizational citizenship behaviors are affected when recognizing the presence of individual's or organization's ethical climates. But the perceived social climates are not directly related with the OCB.
Third, the perceived ethical climates did not affect organizational commitment in general. Especially, social responsibility climate influenced organizational commitment in a negative way. This result gave us remarkable meanings showing opposite consequence compared to the precedent research outputs. The IT industry, in Korea, has high turnover rate due to the fast changes in info-technology and also, retiring age is lower than other jobs. Thus, this result showed us less devotion and loyalty of IT industry employees compared to other industries.
Fourth, the operant ethical mechanism partly acted as the intermediate role in the process of perceived ethical climates influencing organizational effectiveness, such as job satisfaction, organizational citizenship behaviors, organizational commitment;
In relationship between perceived ethical climates and job satisfaction, the effect of operant ethical actors increased much more than direct effect of perceived ethical climates on the job satisfaction.
In relationship between perceived ethical climates and OCB, the effect of operant ethical mechanism as the intermediate increased much more compared to direct effect, also. Especially, social climates did not significantly influence OCB directly, but it did give significant positive effects with operant ethical mechanism.
In relationship between perceived ethical climates and organizational commitment, the subordinate factors like caring climates, rule and standards climates did not directly influence organizational commitment, and social responsibility climate preferably affected negatively. However, with operant ethical mechanism, it influenced significant positiveness. The organizational commitment greatly showed the intermediate effect of operant ethical mechanism. Thus, organizational commitment can be increased with the roles of operant ethical actors and by building operant ethical system.
Consequently, we could verify that the perceived ethical climate affecting job satisfaction, OCB, organizational commitment increased partially by mediating operant ethical mechanism.
And finally, in the path analysis of operant ethical mechanism, operant ethical system affected roles of ethical actors, which showed us that ethical behaviors of actors are strongly influenced by the presence of operant ethical system in the company. As a conclusion, it can be said that the presence and the practice of ethical system would be the most important for a company to give a birth of organizational effectiveness by introducing the ethical management.