PhD defence G. (Guillem) Casoliva Cabana

Brief summary of the doctoral thesis:

This dissertation studies the role of team ethical culture (TEC) in the prevention of unethical behavior. Scandals around unethical behavior continue to surface in all type of organizations: private, public, and non-governmental. Despite the growing adoption of ethics programs to prevent unethical behavior, the headlines about such scandals and the surveys that have been conducted in the workplace consistently indicate its high prevalence worldwide. The studies comprising this dissertation aim to improve our understanding of TEC and its role in making an ethics program effective at preventing unethical behavior. I draw from different sources within the literatures, which can be broadly categorized as organizational culture studies (differentiation perspective) and institutional theory (decoupling). I use surveys to gather insights from actual teams within an organization and to confirm the existence of different TECs and their impacts on ethics management. Overall, this dissertation’s novelty in the study of ethical culture is the use of one organization as a case study, while contributing to a better understanding of the effectiveness of ethics programs at preventing unethical behavior across teams.