Ethical Practices and Organizational Performance: Understanding Linkages from Deposit-Taking SACCOs in Kenya

Abstract

As employees understand what amounts to acceptable behavior within an organization, their ethical choices can be moulded and this gives leaders an opportunity to actually shape the ethical climate. Strategic leaders have a role to emphasize on ethical practices. The main objective of the study was to establish the influence of ethical practices on performance of DepositTaking SACCO’s in Kenya. The study adopted positivism paradigm and descriptive correlational design. The study focused on all 42 Deposit -Taking SACCOs in Nairobi County. Structured Questionnaires were administered on 126 senior managers. For data analysis both descriptive and inferential statistics was utilized. Descriptive analysis entailed mean and standard deviation. As for inferential statistics, correlation and regression analysis were conducted. The article unveiled that ethical practices had a positive and significant influence on performance. The research provides insights into the perception of ethical practices in the Kenyan SACCO context, specifically in the Deposit-Taking SACCOs, a service- oriented sector where ethical practices become a must for a better performance. The results of this study seem to allude to an ethical practices performance paradigm. Further research should be conducted on other factors that can influence performance of DepositTaking SACCOs other than ethical practices.