Outcomes of Ethics Training Programs in the Workplace: Review of Empirical Research

Unethical practices in organizations have posed challenges to the established approaches to developing an ethical workforce, both at universities and in the workplace. Whereas prior literature reviews predominantly focused on ethics education in academic institutions, evidence from ethics training in the workplace remains fragmented. This paper reviews 41 empirical studies on workplace ethics training with a focus on reported training outcomes and research designs. Overall, our findings indicate a positive impact of ethics training programs and point to some mixed results. We outline trends in ethics training across the reviewed studies, discuss researchers’ overemphasis on the cognitive processes of moral development, and the tendency to examine convenient outcomes. Informed by the findings, we propose a framework that categorizes ethics training outcomes by levels of analysis and time. The framework underpins outcomes that have received empirical support and those that remain to be explored. In particular, we propose the concept of ethical safety as a precondition for ethical behavior in groups and organizations. We conclude with recommendations for future research and practice on ethics training in the workplace.