Tržište (Jul 2009)
Croatian employee’s behavior and attitudes with respect to ethical norms for business practices
Abstract
Ethical norms for business practices differ by intensity and variety across countries so managers from multinational corporations (MNCs) entering transitional economies must be able to staff subsidiaries understanding this dilemma. The aim of this article is to get a better understanding of workers’ behavior and attitudes with respect to business ethics in Croatia. We explored four ethics issues: (1) attitude to ethical issues in general, (2) information manipulation, (3) environmental issues and (4) law issues. The question we pose is: can workers be placed into meaningful groups by consideration of the variation in a number of economic, demographic and behavioral/attitudinal traits? Improved knowledge of ethical behavior of different groups of workers should be useful to managers and policy makers who want to encourage ethical behavior among those segments of population where it is currently rare. Results could be useful both to policy makers at the government level, and to the managers who might be worried that a low sensitivity to ethical issues could influence their firms’ performance.