Toward an Organizational Ethics Culture Framework: An Analysis of Survey Data From Local Government Managers

Abstract

This research explores what public managers think about the elements of an ethical organizational culture predominately discussed in the literature. It develops a multidimensional framework of these elements and uses it to explore data from a national survey of local government administrators. The framework is derived from the literature in public administration on organizational ethics. This research tests the organizational ethics framework on city managers, one type of public manager. The results of the survey at the local level showed a need for more priority setting in public administration on ethics and organizational culture. Our major finding is that an ethical organizational culture is multidimensional, containing six main elements. Together these should be understood to explain the ethics culture in local government organizations and potentially other governments.

Keywords:

• Organizational culture
• ethics
• local government
• survey
• public management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The first draft of the survey instrument was pilot-tested with a small group of local government managers and administrators and minor improvements to the survey were made based on statistical analysis and the comments of responders. We also tested the survey’s construct reliability using Cronbach’s alpha. Alpha coefficients greater than .7 are considered adequate to indicate internal consistency. All our survey constructs obtained alpha coefficients higher than .7 (between .72 and .95).

2 Note that local government administrators and managers are public officials and their responses to the survey relate to their official duties. Therefore, this survey is exempt from IRB review. In addition, because there was no institutional funding involved and the survey was distributed and administered by the ICMA, the authors had no interactions with subjects, and the results were given to them only as completely anonymized data, the authors were not required to seek IRB approval.