The Assessment of the Ethical Organizational Culture: Validation of an Italian Short Version of the Corporate Ethical Virtues Model Based Questionnaire

Background: In the context of the relationship between work and ethics, it is essential to be able to analyse the Ethical Organizational Culture of the work environment through the use of multidimensional tools. The lack of validated tools on the Italian population led us to develop a short Italian version of the Kaptein’s Corporate Ethical Virtues Model. The purpose of this study is to validate this tool to be used in Italy, in public administration notably. Methods: Within an assessment campaign of the working conditions of the operators (all 10422 white collar employees) of an Italian Public Administration for the purposes of welfare and safety of working conditions we performed a validation study. At the time of the survey, an exploratory factor analysis was carried out by selecting the items on the basis of factor loads. We used the Cronbach’s alpha coefficients to evaluate the internal consistency. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to assess the goodness-of-fit of the latent structure underlying the ethical culture indicators. Results: In the exploratory factor analysis out of 690 questionnaires, 405 (59%) were filled out; we selected 24 items with a load factor between 0.61 and 0.92. The internal consistency was good (α=0.917). In the confirmatory factor analysis, out of 5497 questionnaires, 3706 (67%) were filled out; the confirmatory factor analysis model showed an excellent adaptation of the model of the eight-dimensional structure of the 24-item questionnaire (RMSEA=0.052 [90%CI 0.050-0.054], CFI=0.96, TLI=0.95). Conclusion: The Italian short version of the Corporate Ethical Virtues Model based Questionnaire demonstrated good psychometric properties. In Italy the adapted questionnaire has evidence of its validity and reliability to be used in further studies and to be able to conduct surveys on ethical climate about companies and to foster actions to improve working conditions in relation to ethics.