Perception of What the Ethical Climate is and What it Should be: The Role of Gender, Academic Status, and Ethical Education

 
16
: 205–217, 1997.
© 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
Harsh K. Luthar
Ron A. DiBattista
Theodore Gautschi
Harsh K. Luthar is an assistant professor at Bryant College.
He has a Ph.D. in Management from VA. Tech. His
research interests include business ethics, gender bias in
management decision making, sexual harassment, and
research methodology issues.
Ron A. DiBattista is an associate professor of manage-
ment at Bryant College, Smithfield, Rhode Island,
where he teaches MBA and undergraduate management
courses. He recently completed a year as Interim Director
of the Graduate School at Bryant. He received his Ph.D.
from Arizona State University in 1979. His research
interests include topics in human resources management,
business ethics, and organizational behavior.
Theodore Gautschi, consultant and author, retired as a pro-
fessor of management at Bryant College, Smithfield,
R.I. Gautschi has more than 30 years of experience in 
management with high-technology companies and
agencies in the U.S. and 19 years’ teaching at Bryant.

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1990s. With the passage of the new U.S.
Sentencing Commission’s guidelines, “rational
business organizations are now compelled to
sharply intensify their attention to managerial
ethics” (Dalton et al., 1994, p. 7). Indeed our
society has become more sensitive to ethical
considerations in the conduct of business and
treatment of employees by organizations as
evidenced by the passage of various laws over the
last three decades to regulate corporate behavior.
The government has involved corporate America
in creating social change both through offers of
rewards and threats of punishment (Hall and Hall,
1994).
Although there is an expectation that corpo-
rations should comply with federal and state laws
and generally behave ethically, many people view
the intentions of top managers with some
cynicism. A national poll in 1987 found that 76%
of the American public believed business people
lacked ethics and viewed this as contributing to
a decline in moral standards (Reidenbach and
Robin, 1987). Cynicism is increasing in the
contemporary American workplace. Kanter and
Mirvis (1989) found that 43% of Americans
mistrust most authority figures and believe they
should look out for themselves. They further
reported that confidence in business and leader-
ship has fallen from approximately 76% in the
late 1960s to about 15% today. Such skepticism
on part of the public is understandable. Certainly,
newspaper headlines about insider trading on
Wall Street, financial and personal scandals on