HOW ETHICAL CULTURE EVOLVES? THE INTEGRATION BETWEEN CORPORATE ETHICAL VIRTUES (CEV) AND CULTURAL EVOLUTION THEORY (CET)
Understanding how ethical culture emerges, persists, and transforms within organizations remains a central yet underdeveloped question in business ethics research. Existing studies predominantly provide proximate explanations of ethical culture—focusing on mechanisms such as leadership behavior, formal controls, and organizational policies—while offering limited insight into the deeper forces that shape its evolutionary origins. This article integrates Corporate Ethical Virtues (CEV) with Cultural Evolution Theory (CET) to develop a comprehensive framework explaining both the proximate and ultimate determinants of ethical culture. The CEV model conceptualizes ethical culture as a system of eight interrelated virtues that guide ethical expectations and behavior. CET extends this framework by identifying the evolutionary forces—transmission, selection, and variation—that influence how ethical traits spread, stabilize, or decline within organizational populations over time. By situating CEV within an evolutionary logic, the article explains why ethical virtues endure, how they are socially learned and reinforced, and why they differ across units, organizations, and national contexts. The proposed integration offers a theoretically richer and more dynamic account of ethical culture, highlights leadership and social learning biases as key mechanisms of cultural selection, and reveals how variation enables both adaptation and ethical drift. This synthesis provides a foundation for new research on the evolution of organizational ethics and offers actionable insights for designing and sustaining ethical culture in diverse institutional environments.