Organizational Ethics in a Developing Country: A Comparative Analysis between Managers and Employees

Relationships with one’s employees, coworkers, or superiors create ethical problems. Employees’ judgments and ethical perceptions have been extensively studied in Western cultures, but not in developing countries. The purpose of this investigation is to examine employees’ work-related ethics: their moral philosophies (idealism and relativism), optimism, and epistemic values as compared to top-management, concerning various ethically challenging situations in organizations in a developing country. Trinidad and Tobago, a Caribbean country, was selected as the research setting – and provided the sampling frame – for this study. The results suggested that respondents perceived all ethically challenging situations as unethical but employees and managers had significant differences when such practices were “major.” Managers perceived organizational unethical practices in more stringent way than employees did, had less epistemic vices and were less idealistic than employees did. However, there was no difference between managers and employees related to moderate unethical organizational practices, minor unethical organizational practices, relativism, optimism, and epistemic virtues. Discussion of the results and implications are provided