Abstract

The United States Sentencing Commission has issued a call to academic researchers to examine how ethics/compliance programs impact the ethical climate of organizations. This is important to marketing practitioners and academics, because of the relationships between ethical climate and internal marketing related outcomes revealed by past empirical and conceptual research. This research examines these two questions: what is the relationship between ethics/compliance training and level of ethical climate, and what is the relationship between level of ethical climate and levels of intra-firm trust, organizational market orientation, and employee commitment to quality? The findings do not support a significant relationship between ethics/compliance training and level of ethical climate in the time frame allocated for this study. The findings do indicate a significant and positive relationship between level of ethical climate and the levels of intra-firm trust, organizational market orientation, and employee commitment to quality. Higher levels of ethical climate are associated positively with higher levels of intra-firm trust, market orientation, and employee commitment to quality