How does ethics reform in government affect moral reasoning and perceived discretion in patronage-prone organizations?

Original

How does ethics reform in government affect moral reasoning and perceived discretion in patronage-prone organizations?

Minsung Michael Kang, Don S. Lee, Soonae Park

Abstract

While ethics reforms have become integral to contemporary public management, their consequences for organizational behavior remain insufficiently theorized. Bringing together organizational control theory and ethical climate theory-two perspectives developed largely in isolation-this study examines how ethics reform shapes discretion and moral reasoning in public organizations. Leveraging South Korea's 2022 Conflict of Interest Act, we apply coarsened exact matching with a difference-in-differences design to survey data from 4,138 civil servants. Following the reform, civil servants in patronage-prone organizations exhibit lower perceived discretion and higher moral reasoning than the control group. These findings point to a dual mechanism: control-based mechanisms reshape discretion, while climate-based mechanisms strengthen ethical competence.