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This study aims to examine and describe ways that organisations in corporate South Africa try to embed ethos of corporate codes of ethics in their organisations.

The study followed a quantitative research approach. The target population was the top 500 companies operating in the corporate sector by revenue. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire from 222 company secretaries and heads/managers responsible for ethics in the companies.

The findings show that the majority of companies have regulations that can help promote ethics ethos. The most prevalent artefact in the area of regulation was found to be conduct of ethical audits. Training was found to be the most prevalent artefact under staff support.

The study was limited to large organisations in South Africa. The findings can thus not be generalised to include small- and medium- sized businesses which make up the largest segment of all businesses in South Africa.

The research provides information that can be used to compare companies operating in different contexts on practices that help promote corporate ethics quality. It provides business managers with information that they can use to evaluate and benchmark their companies on practices that help promote the ethos of corporate codes of ethics.

The study is the first of its kind to examine how organisations go about institutionalising codes of ethics in South Africa. The findings can be used by all sectors of South African business as a point of reference in their efforts aimed at embedding the ethos of ethics in their respective organisations.

Engaged employees assure organizational competitiveness and sustainability. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between job resources and employee turnover intentions, with employee engagement as a mediating variable.

Data were collected from 934 employees of eight wholly-owned pharmaceutical industries. The proposed model and hypotheses were evaluated using structural equation modeling. Construct reliability and validity was established through confirmatory factor analysis.

Data supported the hypothesized relationship. The results show that job autonomy and employee engagement were significantly associated. Supervisory support and employee engagement were significantly associated. However, performance feedback and employee engagement were nonsignificantly associated. Employee engagement had a significant influence on employee turnover intentions. The results further show that employee engagement mediates the association between job resources and employee turnover intentions.

The generalizability of the findings will be constrained due to the research’s pharmaceutical industry focus and cross-sectional data.

The study’s findings will serve as valuable pointers for stakeholders and decision-makers in the pharmacuetical industry to develop a proactive and well-articulated employee engagement intervention to ensure organizational effectiveness, innovativeness and competitiveness.

By empirically demonstrating that employee engagement mediates the nexus of job resources and employee turnover intentions, the study adds to the corpus of literature.

Whether an organization’s political behaviour is positively related to its performance has been a long-standing question. Most studies elaborating on this issue, although rich in detail, primarily have been limited to case studies, apart from a niche set of studies in international business. This study aims to explore this question through a survey study of managers and executives from around the world, across a range of industries.

The study explores the link between politics, the ability of a firm to speedily reach the market and its growth rate through a study of 382 executives from across the world. It also investigates alternative explanations of slow speed to market due to power centralization, decision-making layers and conflict.

The results show that politics – the observable but often covert actions through which executives influence internal decisions – has a direct negative effect on a firm’s ability to reach the market first and on its growth rate. That is, not only is politics time-consuming but it may also have a detrimental impact on the selection of the best growth opportunities.

Politics does have a negative impact on growth; it slows down a firm’s growth and its ability to reach the market. This study eliminates possible alternative explanations of a slow pace to market: slower companies are not so because they have too many decision-making layers but because they use consultative processes in resource-allocation decisions, or because of conflict.