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Points out that the trend in the USA and the UK to adopt business codes of ethics has been followed in recent years by Australian business organizations. Presents findings from two studies which involved the top 500 Australian enterprises. The first examined the likelihood of code adoption in relation to such variables as organization type, size, income and major activities. The second was concerned with the actual nature of the content to determine whether codes were designed to deal with ethical issues, corporate values and ethical decision skills rather than with management policies and legal issues; and whether a code was in fact a code of ethics as opposed to rules on business etiquette and behaviour.

The paper investigates the effectiveness of codes of ethics to influence the behaviour of employees. Vignettes are not part of the methodology as the core data come from the direct observations of behaviours reported by 25 top managers and 545 employees from eight large Australian enterprises. One aim of the research is to measure the consistency of the observed behavioural patterns among employees and to investigate the possible association of high consistency with particular ethics strategies. The research models are based on medians and tallies of percentage frequencies of behavioural patterns. Two matters of importance are concluded from the investigation. First, there is no discernible association between the consistency ratings of the enterprises and their particular strategies in ethics. Second, the analysis suggests that the strongest ethical culture affecting behaviour in the respondents comes from an external, shared source.