Ethical Climate and Ethical Leadership in Public Accounting Firms

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between ethical work climate and corporate leadership. We discuss leadership style, ethical work climate, and ethical leadership. We seek to explore these relationships among established conceptual frameworks, and we intend to apply them to public accounting firms at the conceptual level. The paper concludes with a proposed model to empirically investigate how the frameworks and concepts apply to the public accounting setting. The goal is to ascertain whether the proposed relationships hold within the setting of professional service firms in order to better understand the factors impacting ethical behavior in public accounting firms.