Strong ethical cultures, it turns out, offer some benefits.

New research from the Ethics Resource Center (ERC) indicates that organizations with strong ethical values experience less misconduct, more frequent reporting of misbehavior, and less retaliation on the job.

(Interesting note about the ERC: The organization’s chairman is former U.S. Representative Michael Oxley, who some of you may know as the coauthor of a little-known 2002 law.)

Here are some findings from the study (note: “stronger” relates to ethical strength):

• In stronger cultures, far fewer employees (4 percent) feel pressure to commit misconduct than in weaker cultures (15 percent);

• Rates of observed misconduct in stronger cultures are roughly half as high (39 percent) as in weaker cultures (76 percent);

• In stronger as opposed to weaker ethical cultures, failure to report observed misconduct declines by more than a third, from 43 percent to 28 percent; and

• The retaliation rate in stronger ethical cultures is 4 percent, compared to 24 percent in weaker cultures.

Page 7 of the research brief contains a fascinating (and lengthy) rundown of the specific types of misconduct observed within all companies. Here is a partial list of the most frequently observed forms of misconduct among companies with “weak or weak-leaning” ethical cultures:

1. Lying to employees (observed within 40 percent of these organizations);

2. Abusive behavior (40 percent);

3. Company resource abuse (38 percent);

4. Discrimination (30 percent);

5. Conflicts of interest (26 percent);

6. Employee benefits violations (23 percent);

7. Lying to customers, vendors, or the public (23 percent);

8. Internet abuse (23 percent);

9. Inappropriate alteration of documents (20 percent); and

10. Health and safety violations (20 percent). ###