ABSTRACT
Rigorous Ethics and Compliance programmes can certainly drive people to act ethically, but it may just be in order to follow the rules, or out of fear of getting caught, rather than any genuine desire to do the right thing. Company culture and norms are critical in explaining why and how unethical behaviour occurs. Corruption takes root where opportunity and culture let it: industries become prone to practices like bribery because collective pressures end up shaping how business gets done, 'normalising' unethical behaviour. When a sector's culture drifts grossly out of alignment with stakeholder values and expectations – as in banking, for example – ethical problems arise and profound change is required. Long-running research by the US-based Ethics Resource Center supports the central role of culture in predicting ethical conduct. Its 2013 national survey of the US workforce found that frequency of misconduct mirrors the strength of a company's ethics culture.
