2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Early-Career Engineers’ Views of the Ethical Climate of Professional Engineering Workplaces

Understanding the ethical climate of professional engineering workplaces is essential to promoting integrity, accountability, and public trust in the profession. Ethical decision-making is a fundamental aspect of engineering practice; however, there is limited research exploring how engineers experience and define ethical climate within their respective fields using a qualitative analysis approach. This study uses thematic analysis with deductive codes from two widely used frameworks of ethical climate that have been previously utilized in quantitative approaches to studying ethical climate.

This research is part of a decade-long, NSF-funded longitudinal research project focused on understanding how engineering students and early-career professionals view ethics and related concepts, and how those perspectives change over time. For the study described in this paper, our data set came from semi-structured interviews with 29 early-career engineers across diverse industries at a single time point. The interviews covered a wide variety of concepts related to ethics, including ethical situations, moral exemplars, and the ethical climate of interviewees’ workplaces.

In our analysis, we used two established ethical climate research frameworks (those of Victor and Cullen and Arnaud) to understand how participants described the ethical climates of their workplaces. From this analysis, several key patterns emerged. The ethical climate was most clearly expressed through the ethical dilemmas and conflicts participants faced, rather than direct descriptions of the workplace’s ethical climate. Participants’ experiences aligned well with the two ethical climate framework used, showing the robustness of these theoretical foundations when applied with a qualitative approach. Lastly, we observed that the ethical climate of early-career engineers is most directly shaped by their managers and peers. The responses of their coworkers, particularly their managers, when faced with ethical dilemmas in the workplace set the foundation for the ethical climate of the workplace.

Our findings have implications for understanding how ethical dilemmas are addressed within engineering industries by identifying both individual and institutional factors that influence the decision-making within companies and exploring how engineers define and evaluate their ethical climate. Our study also makes a theoretical contribution by applying two frameworks of ethical climate, which have most commonly been used in quantitative measures, to qualitative data from engineering workplaces. This approach reveals the complexities of the various ethical climates faced by early-career engineers in everyday practice. This research contributes to the ongoing effort to build more ethically resilient engineering cultures that safeguard the public and advance the well-being of society.