Son zamanlarda dünya çapında yaşanan çeşitli etik skandallar, etik konusuna dikkatleri çekmiş ve konu üzerinde çalışmaların artmasına ön ayak olmuştur. Konu, gerek özel gerekse kamu sektörü açısından büyük önem arz eden ve şirketlerin uzun dönemde yaşamlarını sürdürmelerinde en etkili faktörlerden biri olarak gösterilmektedir. Bu çalışmada çalışanların etik dışı uygulamalara yönelik algıları ölçülmeye çalışılmıştır. Özellikle çalışanların çeşitli özellikleri açısından etik dışı uygulamalara yönelik tutum ve davranışlarının farklılık gösterip göstermediği irdelenmiştir. Çalışma uygulama bağlamında özel ve kamu sektörünü kapsamakta ve elde edilen verileri karşılaştırmaktadır. Bu karşılaştırma sonucunda elde edilecek bulguların işletmelerde politika yapıcılar açısından önemli çıktılar ortaya koyacağı düşünülmektedir. Çalışma sonuçların kamu ve özel sektöre ışık tutması beklenmektedir.

In today’s business world, competitiveness has been the first priority and staying alive and obtaining sustainable competitive advantages have become very difficult. Within this circumstance, companies need to be creative, productive and reflect ethical behavior so that they can achieve successful performance outcomes. Several researchers have pointed out that ethic is associated with important performance outcomes such as profitability, image, competitive advantages. On the other hand, according to recent researches, ethical values such as protecting society and environment, respecting fundamental rights of people and integrity as many others are being avoided by business world across the globe. Because of this fact, ethic has been the subject of many research and debate among the academe and practitioners. Especially ethic scandals that have occurred in the recent times have taken the attention of people on ethic and as a result the number of research on this topic has increased. The topic, ethic, is considered to be an important and it is shown as one of the most influential factors over the long term life of thecompanies. Because ethic is a topic associated with every disciplines, firm and society and thus defined in various ways and investigated. Therefore, it is really hard to define ethic in a conclusive manner. Ethic is generally defined as complete moral values and rules that explain what is right and wrong. Similarly there is no consensus on the definition of work ethic. Work ethic concerns what is right and wrong in business situations and doing the right things. There are various unethical practices that can be observed across the business organizations. Based on the literature reviews regarding unethical practices across the companies, the unethical practices can be divided into two categories; socio-cultural and psychological. Socio-cultural types include favoritism, corruption, discrimination and etc. Psychological type covers several practices such as mobbing, intimidation, cruelty, and fraud and etc. There are several ones that can be added to list of both socio-cultural and psychological types. The type and degree of these unethical practices vary depending on the sector and company and people involved. There are various reasons that these unethical practices are being experience within corporate world. The reasons behind the unethical practices within firms derive from both personal and organizational characteristics. In order to tackle the unethical issues, organizations need to monitor their practices and identify the unethical practices and try to find the root cause of these practices and try to resolve them. Sometimes organizations struggle to identify the unethical issues and subsequently resolve them because the unethical issue has various dimensions and it is difficult to determine whether the issue is ethical or unethical. These types of situations are also likely to occur in business word and require more effort into understanding and resolving the issue. Business ethic is relatively new concept within business discipline and has been a growing subject and has become more important topic especially during 1970s. As explained above ethic and business ethic topics have become important research topics and thus they have been investigated through several theoretical and empirical studies. We also aimed to study this subject within Turkish context, considering the fact that ethical values are not well recognized and well implemented within corporate business world in Turkey as some recent studies have reflected. In order to increase importance of work ethic values, its understanding and its implementation, it is important to conduct this type of research and spread the result within the corporate world. Academic world need to put extra effort in this subject matter so that a considerable amount of research is conducted in different sectors across the country. In this study, we focused on the work ethic and tried to measure the attitude of the employees toward unethical practices. Especially, this study investigates whether the attitude of the employees toward unethical practices differ based on demographic characteristics. This study cover both private and public sector. We selected one private and one public institution and collected the data from the employees from both institutions and then compared the result of the study between private and public sector. We used survey technique for the data collection. We conducted a through literature review and established the theoretical part of the study. We also searched for the best scale in order to measure the research variables. We have taken the research scales from the previous well known studies and conducted our research. Data was collected from two institutions, one private and one public institution. In order to compare the result, data was collected from both private and public institution. In this study, the participants have reflected the similar views in general on unethical practices based on different sector and demographic characteristics, yet there were differences regarding to different unethical practices. This study compared the results based on sex, age, education and sector (private and public). The analyses have done on the public and private separately and mixed samples. There were some different views on different unethical practices. The differences were occurred sometimes in terms of the degree on “do not agree” or in terms of between “agree” and “disagree”. The results reflected the fact that employees from both private and public sector have conscious thoughts regarding the unacceptability of unethical practices in the workplace. This result is satisfactory because employees from both public and private sector have opposite views regarding unethical practices in the workplace. They have also reflected different degree of views on the different value statements regarding unethical work practices. These results show that both private and public sector organizations need to pay attention to attitudes of the employees regarding unethical practices. They need to better explain ethical and unethical practices. In order for organization to be ethical in their practices and operations, they need to make sure that ethical practices are understood and well implemented among the employees. For this reason they need to explain the importance of ethic and its implication for the better view of the organization among the public and other institutions and consequently for the successful performance.