Authors: Evangelia Pappa, John Filos, Savvas Chatzipanagiotidis

Title: Βusiness ethics and integrity in the private sector: The view from the top

Abstract

Business ethics is a set of rules, moral principles and values that every individual must abide by and the business is obliged to follow as to be resilient to integrity violations. The purpose of the study is to explore the relationship between the code of ethics and different types of integrity violations. A well-structured questionnaire was used as a primary data collection. The survey sample consists of 1332 middle and lower level managers of core industry sectors in Greece. Confirmatory Factor analysis is employed to measure and categorize different types of ethics violations. Given the categorical binary nature of the data regarding the existence of a code of conduct, a binary logistic regression analysis is used to test the research hypotheses. Based on the results, policy implications are discussed and recommendations of improving business integrity are suggested.

Keywords: Business ethics, integrity, code of ethics, managers, quantitative techniques.

JEL Classification: Μ1, M14, L53