A total of 747 HR professionals responded. The first section of the survey included questions on business ethics standards, pressure to compromise those standards, violations of the standards and organization response to the problems of misconduct. It doesn't tell us how ethical human resource professionals are nor how ethical their organizations are. We are comparing the perceptions of human resource professionals to those of a cross-section of employees in American business. In the NBES, we identified widely differing approaches to business ethics in American organizations.
Some companies have a code of conduct, with no training or ethics office.
Others have a code of conduct, a mandatory training program for all employees and an ethics office or ombudsman. We refer to these as 'Best Practices' organizations. In this report, we compare benchmarks for both categories of organizations to perceptions of human resource professionals. Some have constant, regular pressure - systemic pressure to violate the code of conduct in order to achieve business objectives. In other organizations, pressure is felt on rare occasions .