Building Ethical Business Cultures: BRIC by BRIC

As the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRICs) continue to grow both in size and clout, and their resident multinational corporations become major players in global markets, questions pertaining to trust and integrity, and of universally shared standards for ethical business behavior become important concerns for numerous stakeholders. Whether or not managers and employees behave ethically depends on how one defines ethical behavior and applies it to an organization’s culture. We start this article by discussing attributes of ethical business behavior and cultures in each of the four BRICs countries, and then present results of our recent large scale survey-based studies, comparing managers’ and employees’ perceptions of ethical cultures in BRICs and in economically developed Western economies