2000 National Business Ethics Survey (NBES)

Executice Summary

The 2000 National Business Ethics Survey (NBES) is a nationally representative telephone survey of 1,500 U.S. employees. The NBES asks employees about formal ethics programs(1) as well as informal ethics practices(2) in the organizations for which they work.

The 2000 survey has two main purposes. The first is to gather reliable data on key ethics and compliance outcomes for use in benchmarking by interested organizations. The second is to help identify and to better understand ethics issues that are important to employees. In fulfilling these purposes, the 2000 NBES provides continuity in measuring traditional ethics and compliance outcomes and also gathers new data in areas of emerging interest.

While there are already a number of studies on the national level that focus on what organizational leaders and managers think about business ethics, these 2000 NBES data offer opportunities to learn about and from the perceptions of employees at all levels. In analyzing these data, we seek to provide information that can be used by organizational leaders and ethics researchers to benefit organizations and the employees who work for them.

In developing the 2000 survey questions and in writing this report, we were guided by a select group of advisors. Advisors were chosen for their subject matter expertise and for their diverse perspectives. The group consisted of ethics officers at Fortune 1000 companies, directors of ethics centers, academic researchers in organizational ethics and professionals in related fields. Advisors also represent the government, for-profit and non-profit sectors. Their guidance benefited both the research process and the content of this report. The Ethics Resource Center (ERC) takes full responsibility for all final content.

Major Findings

• Ethics outcomes in the 2000 NBES are favorable in comparison to the 1994 Ethics in American Business survey (EAB).
• Formal ethics programs are positively related to ethics outcomes such as reports of misconduct and employees feeling more valued..
• Formal ethics programs are more strongly related to ethics outcomes when organizations are in periods of transition.(3) (4)
• The application of key ethical values in the workplace is positively related to ethics outcomes such as employees feeling less pressure to compromise ethics standards and observing less misconduct.
• The modeling of ethical behavior by organizational leaders, supervisors and coworkers is positively related to ethics outcomes such as employees being more satisfied with their organizations overall and feeling less pressure to commit misconduct.
• One in eight employees feel pressure to compromise their organizations' ethics standards.
• Almost two-thirds of all employees who feel pressure to compromise their organizations ethics standards attribute this pressure to internal sources - supervisors, top management and coworkers.
• Employees with longer tenure in their organizations feel more pressure to compromise their organizations' ethics standards.
• About one in every three employees observe misconduct at work.
• The five types of misconduct observed most frequently include:

    1. Lying;
    2. Withholding needed information;
    3. Abusive or intimidating behavior toward employees;
    4. Mis-reporting actual time or hours worked; and
    5. Discrimination.

• Employees who feel pressure to compromise ethics standards also observe more misconduct in the workplace.
• More than two in five employees do not report the misconduct they observe at work.
• Approximately one in three employees fear retaliation by management and coworkers if they report misconduct or other ethics concerns.
• Two in five employees who report misconduct are dissatisfied with their organizations' response.
• Employees' past satisfaction with their organizations' response to reported misconduct is related to their fears of retaliation for future reporting.
• Employees say that their organizations' concern for ethics is an important reason that they continue to work there.
• Many employees believe that, overall, their supervisors and organizational leaders talk about and model ethical behavior at work.
• Senior and middle managers' perceptions about ethics in their organizations are consistently more positive than those of lower level employees.
• There are relatively few differences in the ethics perceptions of employees in the government, for-profit and non-profit sectors.

Joshua Joseph
Research Analyst

1. The NBES gathers data on three elements common to many ethics programs: written ethics standards, ethics training and a means to seek ethics advice, such as a telephone help-line or ethics office.

2. Informal ethics practices may include talking about ethics, applying ethical values in the workplace and modeling of ethical behavior by leaders, supervisors and coworkers.

3. In this report, we use the terms transition and transitioning to refer to organizations that have been through a merger, acquisition or restructuring within the last two years.

4. These findings emerge when we control for transitions in the analysis. In other words, they are based on select comparisons between employees in transitioning organizations that have and do not have formal