Corporate culture is crucial for all businesses, regardless of their size and goals. Ethical culture can assist companies in making ethical decisions and maintaining a positive business image. To create a value-driven culture of integrity, it would be useful to consider Kantian ethics and virtue ethics as the two primary ethical theories. As explained by Joseph (2016), virtue ethics focuses on the qualities possessed by a moral person to define the virtues that make people moral.
Kantian ethics, in turn, distinguish right from wrong “based upon rules and principles that are then assumed from ethical duties and responsibilities” (Joseph, 2016, p. 101). Hence, virtue ethics can be used by the organization to define and exemplify the characteristics of its value-based culture of integrity, whereas Kantian ethics can help to tie ethical behavior to employees’ duties and responsibilities.
To achieve a values-driven culture of integrity, the company needs to consider two strategies. On the one hand, compliance processes could help the organization to guarantee integrity from the legal viewpoint and highlight the importance of integrity on the organizational level (Paine, 1994).
On the other hand, the company would also need to establish an ethical governance program, which would include a code of conduct, training in ethical decision-making, reporting and investigation mechanisms, and audits focused on values and ethics (Paine, 1994). Since management plays a key role in defining and maintaining corporate culture, managers should also consider how they make decisions. The process of rational decision-making could help as it can be tailored to respond to the organization’s needs (“Rational and nonrational,” n.d.). As part of this process, managers would create integrity-related goals and criteria and then apply them to alternatives to perform an ethical analysis.