07. Does Ethical Behavior Within an Institution Affect Employee Engagement?

Abstract

Poster

TITLE

Does ethical behavior and practice within an institution effect employee satisfaction and performance?

Industrial Organization, Measurement and Evaluation

Data are fully collected

Interpersonal relationships in the workplace require a fundamental agreement on ethical practices and policies between employees and board. If there is controversial ethical behavior between employers, employees, and coworkers, there is likely to be a decrease in the efficiency and general performance of the company or institution. In addition to ethical awareness, proper training and instruction need to be available to employees to produce an atmosphere of both confidence and competence. Research shows that thorough training increases employee confidence and performance (Abdul Waris, 2015). In the current study, we, the researchers, sought to determine the benefits and repercussions of proper institutional organizational leadership, and ethical culture on overall job satisfaction and employee engagement amongst employees. We seek to better understand the direct relationship between employees’ engagement and satisfaction and the institutions’ ethical practices and values. Furthermore, we assisted the companies and institutions that we researched by making suggestions for improvement on employee engagement and overall job satisfaction based on the results of their input data. This provided a practical application to this important field of research, increasing the benefits of this study. Employees of eight institutions completed a sixty-five item questionnaire (18 dimensions), the Ethical Culture Indicator, in which they rated the various questions of ethics, leadership, trust, organization, etc. on a likert scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (5). The ECI provides quantitative/numeric feedback on Employee Engagement, Ethical Culture statements and allows for open comments centered on ethical issues, strengths and areas of opportunity from an employee perspective. Employees shared their personal experiences within the institution as it related to ethical practices, values, and training. The data was categorized into sublevels grouped by various descriptive factors such as age, tenure, gender, time at the particular institution/company, and some additional more specified factors related to the institution/company. We analyzed this data regression analyses to determine the predictive ability of ethical awareness and ethical culture on employee engagement. Data are fully collected.