Corporate codes of ethics, influential factors

Abstract

Companies increasingly interact with stakeholders through multiple relationships, based on the Code of ethics (CE). CE and standards of professional conduct are important management instruments whose main objective is to transform social power and morality. That is why the use of the codes of ethics maintains the novel awareness about ethics and serves as full guidance to the desirable standards. Today, all areas of professionalization and beyond require ethical standards that are necessary to guide the major impacts of the results of individuals’ practice on the community and environment. The main objective of this article is to identify which are the influential factors of business codes of ethics. As for the methodology, a quantitative methodology was used in the application of a semi-structured questionnaire to a sample of 515 answers where 49.9% of the answers came from people working in large companies, considering large companies those with more than 250 people, 30.1% from medium-sized companies, 11.7% from small companies between 10 and 49 employees and 8.7% from micro-companies with less than 9 employees. The results of the study determined that in companies where employees have access to the corporate ethics initiatives, they exert a positive influence on the ethical behavior of the organization