How to Motivate Employees' Ethical Behavior--Based On Management Control Theory

摘要

Ethical behavior will affect a company's performance for the long term while the short term benefits of unethical behavior might look positive, which influences more and more companies and scholars to find a way to motivate employees' ethical behavior. Of the current literatures, a majority is found on the issue of corporate codes of ethics. Even though some of the studies give some suggestions on shaping ethical behaviors, few are base on academic theory. In this paper, we try to prove how applying a management control theory to motivate employees' ethical behaviors, a company could shape ethical behavior by creating an ethical code of conduct to specify its objective, building a training program to communicate the ethical objective, setting up an ethical committee, ethical auditing to monitor employees' behavior, and building ethical reward systems to reinforce ethical behavior, at the same time, it requires the company's culture to support the ethical control systems.