Ethical work climate, moral awareness and ethical behavior of Public Procurement Officers in Uganda

Abstract

This study focused on establishing the relationship between Ethical Work Climate, Moral Awareness and Ethical Behavior of Public Procurement Officers of the central government procuring and disposable entities in Uganda. It was prompted by reports of unethical behaviors which relates to procurement like; flouting of procurement regulations at various stages of procurement process, sweeteners/kickbacks, and greed. A cross section research design was employed and Primary data was collected from 89 PDEs. A sample 198 procurement officers was drawn from the population of 393 public procurement officers. A total of 190 questionnaires were returned answered and data was analyzed using SPSS software. The results revealed that ethical work climate is composed of Caring, Rules, Efficiency, Service and Independence Climate. The results further showed a significant positive relationship between ethical work climate, subjective norms, moral awareness, perceived behavioral control, ethical attitude and ethical behaviour. The formulated hypotheses were also tested and found that there is positive significant relationship between ethical work climate and ethical behaviour. Also, that there is positive significant relationship between ethical work climate and moral awareness. However, being a cross- sectional study by its nature, subject to common method variances, a replication of the study using a longitudinal approach is recommended. This should be supplemented with more interviews from a cross section of PDEs to tap salient issues from respondents.