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Ethics Training in the Indian IT Sector: Formal, Informal or Both?

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Abstract

Ethics training—an important means to foster ethical decision-making in organisations—is carried out formally as well as informally. There are mixed findings as regards the effectiveness of formal versus informal ethics training. This study is one of its first kinds in which we have investigated the effectiveness of ethics training as it is carried out in the Indian IT sector. We have collected the views of Indian IT industry professionals concerning ethics training (N = 266), and employed positivist (regression analysis and hierarchical linear modeling) and interpretive research (content analysis). We first have argued that the importance of the perception towards ethics has bearings not only on the individual ideologies but also on the organisational ethical values. In doing so, first we have conceptualised a theoretical framework: Perception of Ethics Training in Employees and Organisations (PETINEO). Second, we have studied the correlations between various components of this model. Third, we, under the rubric of PETINEO, examined the effectiveness of ethics training programmes for the Indian IT companies. Fourth, we have elaborated upon the results of our study. Our results suggest that the combination of both formal and informal means to undertake ethics training has superior impact on ethical decision-making in the Indian IT industry as compared to the use of any one of them in isolation.

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Notes

  1. Emanuel Kant, quoted in: Gardner (1999).

  2. Informal learning is a kind of learning which is “implicit, unintended, opportunistic and unstructured learning and the absence of a teacher” (Eraut 2004, p. 250). Whereas the characteristics of formal learning are the following: “a prescribed learning framework, an organised learning event or package, the presence of a designated teacher or trainer, the award of a qualification or credit, and the external specification of outcomes” (Eraut 2000, p. 114).

  3. Millennials are born between the early 1980s to early 2000s (Rainer and Rainer 2011).

  4. Aristotle, quoted in: Benn (1998).

  5. Ethicist Rushworth Kidder, quoted in: Johnson (2012).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Prof. Bengt Gustavsson, School of Business, Stockholm University and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and advice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Business, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Pratima Verma & Jan Löwstedt

  2. School of Business, Alliance University, Bengaluru, India

    Siddharth Mohapatra

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  1. Pratima Verma
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Correspondence to Pratima Verma.

Appendices

Appendix

See Table 7.

Table 7 Appendix 1: Factor loading from rotated component matrix
Full size table

Appendix 2

KMO and Bartlett’s Test

Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin measure of sampling adequacy

0.877

Bartlett’s test of sphericity

Approx. Chi Square

4806.88

df

595

Sig.

0.000

  1. The values of KMO = 0.89 and χ 2 = 4806.88 are significant (p ≤ 0.001). It indicates that the factor analysis is appropriate

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Verma, P., Mohapatra, S. & Löwstedt, J. Ethics Training in the Indian IT Sector: Formal, Informal or Both?. J Bus Ethics 133, 73–93 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-014-2331-4

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