Understanding Ethical Climates, and Their Relevance for Educational Institutions: Reflections from Literature

Abstract

In the context of current global challenges such as climate change, sustainability, income inequalities, and cutthroat competition in the business environment, the need for students, and teachers to focus on ethical education, or professional ethics, along with the requisite technical knowledge and skills is manyfold, particularly in higher academic institutions, where students from diverse educational backgrounds are imparted knowledge, skills and groomed for future career opportunities. Interestingly, many universities across the world have been increasingly realizing this fact, and successfully offering such courses.  However, it’s natural that, when such theoretical focus is complemented by demonstration in the form of institutions’ ethical climate, the learning will be even more effective and yield the best results for all the stakeholders. In fact, the commonality in the objectives associated with nurturing ethical climates, and offering courses in ethics education is also one of the reasons for this study.

In an organization, climate represents its social environment ‘in terms of a fixed (and broadly applicable) set of dimensions...that are consciously perceived by organizational members’ (Denison, 1996, p. 624). Ethical climates are a subset of organizational work climates, similarly, a climate of innovation, safety, diversity, and justice are among others (Simha & Cullen, 2012). Ethical climates in an organization are the ‘prevailing perceptions of typical organizational practices and procedures that have ethical content’ (Victor & Cullen, 1988, p. 101) among the organizational members. Thus, in the context of an educational institution, ethical climates, for example, represent the prevailing perceptions about processes in an institute such as transparency in the admission process, student grievance handling processes, faculty recruitment processes, evaluation of answer sheets, and grading, student exit processes, and various other processes related to students, faculty and staff administration.

Organizational ethical climates work as guiding principles for organizational agents to identify whether or not a behavior is acceptable; they also influence decision-making, particularly ethical decision-making in organizations (Kish-Gephart, 2010), hence, extending the same line of thought, it is contended that, even in educational institutions, the way various stakeholders such as students in particular, perceive their institution’s ethical climates greatly influences their ethical decision making and complements the efforts of academic institutions in teaching ethics. Hence, a discussion on the importance of ethical climates is needed. This article takes such responsibility along with the task of delineating them by carefully examining the extant literature.