Cultural Values and International Differences in Business Ethics

By Bert Scholtens, Lammertjan Dam. 2007

335 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We analyze ethical policies of firms in industrialized countries and try to find out whether culture is a factor that plays a significant role in explaining country differences. We look into the firm’s human rights policy, its governance of bribery and corruption, and the comprehensiveness, implementation and communication of its codes of ethics. We use a dataset on ethical policies of almost 2,700 firms in 24 countries. We find that there are significant differences among ethical policies of firms headquartered in different countries. When we associate these ethical policies with Hofstede’s cultural indicators, we find that individualism and uncertainty avoidance are positively associated with a firm’s ethical policies, whereas masculinity and power distance are negatively related to these policies.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Safety Research, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cd39553231a80014a72156aaa3079550382f85db

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In Information Systems and Management

In Safety Research

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Citations in the corpus

East Meets West: A Meta-Analytic Investigation of Cultural Variations in Idealism and Relativism (2008, background): “Individuals in cultures that are not uncertainty averse, in contrast, would be more likely to tolerate unexpected actions on the part of members, even when those actions are inconsistent with expectations based on what is considered moral or immoral (Scholtens and Dam, 2007).”
Ethically Minded Consumer Behavior:Scale Review, Development, and Validation (2016, positive): “In other words, ethically minded consumer behavior does not happen in a vacuum, it takes place in social and cultural environments governed by complex and different sets laws, policies, rules and regulations, values, and norms (Scholtens and Dam (2007).”
Individual–Level Resources and New Business Activity: The Contingent Role of Institutional Context (2013, background): “…those that might be relevant for exploiting new business opportunities—and therefore may offer fewer chances for people to leverage their personal resource base with external resources that they might be lacking (Cohen, Pant, & Sharp, 1996; Scholtens & Dam, 2007; Takyi-Asiedu, 1993).”
Corporate Social Responsibility as a Strategic Shield Against Costs of Earnings Management Practices (2014, methodology): “The CSR information is collected from the EIRIS database.3 This database is widely used in the industry and in academic research, including Brammer et al. (2006), Scholtens and Dam (2007), Louche et al. (2012), Dam and Scholtens (2012) or Fabrizi et al. (2013).”
A Twenty-First Century Assessment of Values Across the Global Workforce (2011, methodology): “…cultural values have been used in studies on a diversity of topics such as business ethics and corruption (e.g., Husted 1999, 2000; Scholtens and Dam 2007), environmental performance (Husted 2005; Peng and Lin 2009), and personal moral philosophy and ethical attitudes (Forsyth et al. 2008;…”
Corporate Philanthropic Disaster Response and Ownership Type: Evidence from Chinese Firms’ Response to the Sichuan Earthquake (2009, background): “…characteristics between firms in developed and those in developing countries given different cultural, institutional, legal, economic, and ethical backgrounds between those countries (Amato and Amato, 2007; Ge and Thomas, 2008; Scholtens and Dam, 2007; Shafer et al., 2007; Whitcomb et al., 1998).”