| The purpose of this study was to compare ethical standards and preferred conduct between top executives in the public sector and top executives in the private sector to determine if there was any difference.;The sample was randomly selected. Those from the private sector were randomly chosen from Forbes Magazine "500", and those from the public sector were randomly chosen from lists of officials of federal, state, county and city governments. Questionnaires were mailed to two hundred members from each group.;The questions inquired about type of work, professional organization membership, whether respondents' professional groups or the organizations for which they work had codes of ethics and how often such codes were referred to. Some additional questions described situational ethical problems and the respondent was asked to indicate the intensity of his feelings about various possible solutions. Other questions related to how the respondent views legislation imposing codes of ethics on the two groups and asked them to rate ethical standards compared to other organizational goals.;A comparison of the two groups indicated the level of ethics to be relatively high, at least no unethical practices were revealed. Further, there was no statistically significant differences between the two groups for either hypothesis. The results were interpreted as showing that public and private sector executives have substantial similarities in apparent ethical views.;On the basis of an analysis of both research literature and the relative position of public and private sector executives two hypotheses were developed. Executives in the private sector were expected to view ethical conduct and concepts as being of less importance to organizational goals than do executives in the public sector. Second, public executives were expected to conduct their professional affairs, i.e., take actions, in accordance with a higher level of ethical standards than do private sector executives. |
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