Ethical Climate’s Relationship to Job Satisfaction, Organisational Commitment and Turnover Intention among Employees

Ethical climate is fast becoming an area of importance in the business ethics field; there is a growing need to understand its relationship with job outcomes such as turnover. Given the potential cost attributed to employee turnover that might be incurred by organisations, it is important to have an understanding of this relationship. The objective of this thesis is to perform a detailed analysis into the existing relationship among the ethical climate, organisational commitment, job satisfaction and turnover intentions using employees of different organisations. 150 responses were collected from the participants, who were all from the Famagusta province of North Cyprus. Evidence of an existing strong and positive relationship between how employees perceive a positive ethical climate with job outcomes such as organisational commitment and job satisfaction was displayed in the analysis of results, while an adverse relationship with turnover intentions. The results from the regression demonstrate that ethical climate is an important factor in determining the variation in organisational commitment and job satisfaction, and that ethical climate has minimal influence on the variations in turnover intentions, although organisational commitment shows a much stronger albeit negative relationship with turnover intentions. Findings suggest that top management’s dictate on the ethical climate is significant as employees’ perception of an ethical climate depends on the rules and policies guiding the organisations’ ethical environment, and also how they view the top management as being ethical. The implications, discussions and suggestions for further research were also discussed. Keywords: Ethical climate, Organisational commitment, Job satisfaction, Turnover intentions.