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Empirical evidence concerning the relationship between diversity and firm performance continues to produce mixed results that are context-dependent (Guillaume et al., 2017). Additionally, little is known about the relationship between workplace diversity management and corporate ethics and whether diversity management is a contextual factor to consider in ethics research. This study assesses whether diversity management's contributions to firm performance are maximized through its effects on the firm's ethical processes. This paper examines three manifestations of diversity management (diversity recruitment, diversity staffing, and valuing diversity) and their relationship with firm performance as mediated by internal and external ethics.

The study used a sample from the Fortune 500 list of companies. The variables were constructed using several relevant indicators and applied to archival data collected from corporations' websites. The hypotheses on the relationship among diversity management, corporate ethics, and firm performance were tested using regression from the data gathered on 109 firms.

The analysis indicated that diversity management relates to both aspects of corporate ethics (internal and external ethics) but that only external ethics relate to firm performance. Results also found that external ethics partially mediate the relationship between diversity management and firm performance.

There are limitations to using corporate websites as sources of data. Furthermore, the research design assumed that diversity is an antecedent of ethics. Nevertheless, the findings convincingly demonstrate that diversity management has a strong positive relationship with both aspects of corporate ethics. Recommendations for further research are offered.

The paper shows the value of diversity management and its impact on corporate ethics. Knowing that diversity management efforts contribute positively beyond their intended purpose may encourage managers to continue or implement such efforts, which could lead to more diverse and ethical workplaces and increased firm performance.

The paper addresses critical gaps in research and responds to repeated calls for studies integrating the business case for workplace diversity with its moral imperative (Alder and Gilbert, 2006; van Dijk et al., 2012; Yang and Konrad, 2011). The paper also provides evidence of a link from diversity management to firm performance through external ethics.

The purpose of this general review is to enhance understanding of the importance of a corporation’s whole ethics of governance regime and the connection to governance practices. This connection is often missing from corporate governance discussion. There is need for better business community awareness of a well-developed ethics of governance regime guiding appropriate board structure and composition choices subject to firm age and size, understanding of how these choices evolve as the firm matures and grows, plus the benefits from more emphasis in this area for company director training and development. This paper synthesises the theoretical and empirical insight from the ethics and corporate governance literatures to give guidance on best practice for large, medium size and small stock exchange listed companies. This synthesis of the literature evidences that the preferred Australian Institute of Company Directors agency theory prescription for a corporate board is not always optimal. In terms of practical implications advice is given on sound choices on board composition, director selection, plus director training and development that will give the best probability of effective board decisions and strong firm performance – this is not ‘one size fits all’ corporations advice. Future research should focus on whole ethics of governance regimes and governance practices in place for companies that have succeeded compared with companies that have failed. This will improve understanding in this area. This is a substantial future research agenda item as deeper knowledge of this contrast may add significantly to understanding of corporate success and failure.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a corporate ethical policy, such as a code of ethics, on the unethical behavior of internal and vendor employees in the supply chain in India. It also aims to find whether International Standards Organization (ISO) certification of vendors affects the result and any significant relationship between management commitment and unethical behavior can be supported by the findings as well.

Empirical analyses were conducted on a survey consisting of 43 questions comprising 181 valid responses. Multiple regression analysis that includes four independent variables – code of ethics, management commitment, supply chain principles and personal values taking unethical behavior as dependent variable – was used to find the significance of the relationship.

The implementation of a code of ethics, management commitment, supply chain principles and personal values all have a negative association with unethical behavior. Personal values, measuring a firm’s financial aspects for non-compliance to ethical behavior, have a positive association with unethical behavior. The relationships of top management commitment, personal values with internal employees’ unethical behavior are significant. The significant relationship between management commitment and unethical behavior can be supported by the findings as well. It was also found that ISO certificates and firm size as the control variables did not have any effect on the relationship between the independent variables and unethical behavior. The analysis also shows that ISO 26000 certificate, the international standard for socially responsible operations, does not impact this relationship.

Measuring substantial managerial effort for corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices by asking questions like, “how committed employees think top management is to social responsibility,” may not fully measure substantial managerial effort for CSR practices. To improve the results of the current study, future research can use the CSR index or disclosure as a measure to better reflect management commitment and practice for social responsibility. Second, the current study is limited to measuring how many occurrences of unethical behavior are witnessed by employees instead of what specific unethical behavior is more often witnessed. Considering India has the second largest population in the world, 181 responses may not represent the true practices in the business environment in India for generalization.

The findings suggest that management should put more of an emphasis on improving the commitment of upper-level managers to decrease the overall unethical practices of their employees. The study finds that employees’ personal values influence their ethical behavior. Therefore, communications and training of employees at all levels should emphasis on improving personal values.

Businesses should influence academics to incorporate personal value building in course curricula. The Indian CSR law should incorporate the holistic view of CSR taking care of needs of all stakeholders under the provision of the regulation. In 2015, India became the first country in the world to legislate CSR practices in corporations but it misses the opportunity to sensitize the management and employees on ethical practices as it mainly identified philanthropic expenses as mandatory CSR spending and silent on ethical business practices.

The present study contributes to the literature by bringing supply chain context to the effect of different factors on unethical behaviors and interaction of internal and vendor firms in terms of ethical practices. There are several studies on business ethics in different countries including China, but in the case of India similar studies are not much. The present study fills the gap.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between board ethical commitment and the performance of the company. When directors embed ethics in discharging their duty, it will prohibit frauds, unnecessary actions and decisions that are detrimental to the company.

This study collected data for two years i.e. 2013 and 2014 from the annual report of the biggest 500 companies by market capitalisation as of 31 December 2013 listed under Bursa Malaysia stock exchange. Board ethical commitment is measured based on the Malaysian Code of Corporate Governance (MCCG) and various international best practices while corporate performance is measured based on return on equity, return on assets, net profit margin, market to book value and TobinQ.

This study found that ethical commitment by the board has a significant positive relationship with corporate performance. The findings are robust to the alternative performance measurements and lagged one-year corporate performance.

This paper enhances the theoretical understanding of the contribution of the board of ethical commitment to the sustainable performance of the company. However, this study suffered from a limited data collection period of two years only from the annual report of the company.

This study provides an indicator that the directors need to provide a good ethical leadership example to the employees and committed to built a good ethical work culture in the organisation via establishment of code of ethics. In addition, this code needs to be promoted, enforced and embedded in the operations of the organisation.

This study is original as it not only examines board ethical commitment from MCCG 2012 but also international best practices from various countries such as UK, USA and Europe. It also contributed to the literature and theoretical understanding of the importance of board ethical commitment specifically in developing countries like Malaysia that scarce in the literature.

The objective is to describe a conceptual framework and empirical illustrations of the transparency of SCM ethics in supply chains as a whole.

The research is based on two Scandinavian‐based companies in the telecom and fashion clothing industries, namely: Sony Ericsson and H&M. These two companies are of interest due to their recent involvement in ethical dilemmas and ambiguities that arose on account of their links with questionable and inappropriate corporate actions and behaviour, not by the companies themselves, but by other companies within their supply chains.

Companies present in the worldwide marketplace and society, such as Sony Ericsson and H&M, do not always appear to be dedicated to ethical concerns and commitments within their supply chains as a whole. They tend to create some convenient restrictions in their statements and promises of corporate social responsibility (e.g. codes of ethics).

The transparency of SCM ethics complements recent additions to ethics in SCM. It opens up a different aspect of the theory generation that may support further research of ethical aspects in supply chains.

The paper provides managerial propositions and guidelines regarding the corporate depth of ethical concerns and commitments in corporate actions and behaviour in supply chains. The framework of transparency in SCM ethics highlights those corporate actions and behaviour that may be obscured by the lack of visibility across supply chain levels. In addition, it may reveal potential weaknesses and forthcoming threats in corporate actions and behaviour in ongoing business operations.

One contribution is the ethical consideration in corporate actions and behaviour across different levels in supply chains. Another is that the corporate social responsibility in terms of SCM ethics should also comprise indirect business relationships. The transparency of SCM ethics opens up challenging opportunities for further research of great value to the theory generation and best practices of SCM.

This study aims to examine and describe ways that organisations in corporate South Africa try to embed ethos of corporate codes of ethics in their organisations.

The study followed a quantitative research approach. The target population was the top 500 companies operating in the corporate sector by revenue. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire from 222 company secretaries and heads/managers responsible for ethics in the companies.

The findings show that the majority of companies have regulations that can help promote ethics ethos. The most prevalent artefact in the area of regulation was found to be conduct of ethical audits. Training was found to be the most prevalent artefact under staff support.

The study was limited to large organisations in South Africa. The findings can thus not be generalised to include small- and medium- sized businesses which make up the largest segment of all businesses in South Africa.

The research provides information that can be used to compare companies operating in different contexts on practices that help promote corporate ethics quality. It provides business managers with information that they can use to evaluate and benchmark their companies on practices that help promote the ethos of corporate codes of ethics.

The study is the first of its kind to examine how organisations go about institutionalising codes of ethics in South Africa. The findings can be used by all sectors of South African business as a point of reference in their efforts aimed at embedding the ethos of ethics in their respective organisations.

This paper aims to examine the effect of the corporate ethical approach on the cost of equity capital. This study is conducted on a large international sample on behalf of the world’s most engaged firms from an ethical point of view in 2015.

The multivariate linear regression model is used to meet the purpose of this study and research hypotheses are also examined using a sample of 80 of most ethical firms in the world during the year 2015. Moreover, three variables (i.e. business ethics, corporate social responsibility and executive compensation based on the achievement of sustainable development goals) are used to reflect the corporate ethical approach and the implied cost of equity capital is used for estimating the cost of equity. In this regard, equity cost estimation is the most appropriate approach to test the effect of business ethics on the cost of financing firms.

Based on a sample of 80 firms emerging as the world’s most ethical firms in 2015, the results revealed that firms with better ethics scores are significantly associated with a reduced cost of equity capital. This paper also demonstrates that the executive incentive pays that are based on the objectives of sustainable development are able to explain different outcomes regarding the relation between corporate ethical behaviors and the cost of equity. These findings support arguments in the literature that firms with socially responsible practices have a higher valuation and lower risk.

This study provides implications for global regulators and policymakers when setting social reporting standards, suggesting that corporate ethical engagement reduces the cost of equity capital by decreasing the information asymmetry and thereby reducing the firms’ risk. Therefore, the findings may be informative to international managers and investors when considering the effect of business ethics on the firm’s ex-ante cost of equity. In this perspective, the voluntary disclosure of information makes it possible to mitigate the problems of asymmetry of information and conflict of interest between the firm and its main providers of capital, which could reduce the cost of equity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between business ethics practices disclosure and corporate governance characteristics in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The study uses multiple regression to investigate the association between business ethics disclosure (BED) and corporate governance characteristics in SAA. The study sample is based on 573 non-financial corporations listed on the national stock exchanges of Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe as of 31 December 2015.

The findings show that corporate governance characteristics (including the proportion of government ownership, board independence and board gender diversity) are positively and significantly related to BED.

The study contributes to the limited literature by analyzing the relationship between BED practices and corporate governance characteristics in the sub-Sahara African context, which is significantly different from the Anglo-Saxon world.

The aim of this research was to determine the evolution of engagement with business ethics in the top 500 Australian corporations operating in the private sector from 1995 to 2010.

Primary data were obtained via a non-sponsored and unsolicited self-administered mail questionnaire distributed to a census of the top 500 Australian companies operating in the private sector administered in both 1995 and 2010. This paper examines and compares the responses of the companies that possessed a code of ethics at those times.

This paper finds that business ethics has continued to evolve over the period of the study and that, in most cases, such an evolution has been positive, with the majority of companies exhibiting high levels of engagement.

While the responses provided a rich picture of the evolution of Australian corporate engagement with business ethics, further longitudinal research exploring international and cross-cultural contexts would add to this understanding of organisational engagement.

It would seem that codes of ethics have evolved beyond a regulatory requirement and are now considered an integral component of the corporate culture and commercial practice in the majority of Australia’s top 500 companies.

Despite a history of business ethics research, longitudinal studies seeking to understand the evolution of corporate engagement to business ethics are exceedingly rare. This paper, unique and original in its focus on an Australian context, provides a basis for future studies focused on exploring international and cross-cultural contexts. This paper makes a substantive and valuable contribution to the literature as it quantifies the evolution of corporate engagement over a 15-year period.

This paper examines the linkages between the ethics and management control literatures and suggests some potentially fruitful areas for future research and for integration in the classroom.

We review topics in the ethics and management control literatures organizing them around the six modules used in the accounting ethics course taught at the University of Southern California: (a) professional standards, (b) distinguishing right from wrong, (c) understanding why (good) people do bad things, (d) getting employees to behave ethically (corporate ethics programs), (e) getting people to speak up when they see something wrong taking place (Giving Voice to Values), and (f) whistleblowing (the last resort).

While we find many topics where ethics and management control are concerned with similar issues, there are very few papers that approach these topics from the two perspectives.

We provide an overview of topics where ethics and management control overlap, and highlight the need for greater convergence between the two literatures. By linking MCS and ethics, organizations can provide a framework to promote behavior that both contributes to the achievement of the organization’s objectives and also follows ethical principles. We comment on what may happen when ethics and management control diverge, and discuss controls that can promote a strong ethical climate.