73% of Executives Surveyed Consider Industry Unethical

A majority of business executives surveyed in a recent poll agree that good ethics are good business, but more than 20% say they would be willing to bribe a public inspector.

In addition, while 82% of Chicago-area executives polled by Crain’s Chicago Business said most corporate chiefs are honest, 73% consider practices in their own industry unethical.

The findings reported in this week’s edition of the business newspaper were the results of a 23-item questionnaire answered between July 6-13 by 452 business executives, managers and high-ranking officers.

“The dissonance between how people would like to act and how they actually act is not surprising,” said Vivian Weil, director of the Center for the Study of Ethics at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

“Very often, competitive pressures compel perfectly decent people to act as unethically as their competitors,” he added.

When asked, “Does the rhetoric of business ethics exceed the reality for most companies?” 73% of the respondents said it did--which was borne out by the frequently conflicting patterns of response to other questions.

According to the poll, 99% of the respondents agreed with the statement: “Generally speaking, good ethics is good business.”

At the same time, though, 21% said that if they were the owner of a Chicago-area construction company, they would be willing to slip $100 to a city inspector to speed up procedures.

Only 12%, however, felt that the bribery of government officials is sometimes permissible.

Seventy-nine percent of those polled said they considered their own ethics either higher or much higher than those of their peers. Twenty percent rated their ethics as being about the same as those of their peers.

When asked whether business ethics had changed in the past 10 years, 38% of the respondents said they were lower, the same percentage said they were about the same, and only 24% said they were higher.

Although 93% of those polled said businesses should provide all employees with education or training in ethical standards, only 27% said their own companies offered such education or training.