Featured Culture and Business Ethics Expert: Marshall Schminke, BB&T Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Central Florida

What are your main areas of research around business ethics?

I focus on the idea that ethics don’t happen in isolation.  They emerge from a complicated mix of individual and situational factors.  My research explores this messy stew and how it drives ethical behavior.  More specifically, I study the impact of organizational structure and culture on individual ethics, such as trying to understand climates that support or resist ethical decision making, abusive supervision, moral emotions, and ethical efficacy.  My work also examines how ethical and unethical action drifts through organizations.  I study how factors like trust and fairness—which provide the foundation for organizational ethics—“trickle down” the organization from managers to supervisors to line employees. Understanding these patterns helps to explain why relatively small changes in ethical or unethical activity may lead to profound, organization-wide effects.