Impact of informal communication on ethical climate perception: A public hospital sample

Introduction and Purpose: Qualified human power has strategic priorities for hospitals in the first place in the service sector. Especially when the ethical climate in hospitals is high, the motivation of the employees is high. It has been seen that service quality and customer satisfaction are high in institutions where ethical climate is high. In addition, communication has an important place among employees and managers in hospitals. This study aims to determine the relationship between ethical climate perception and informal communication in a public hospital. Materials and Methods: Quantitative research method was used in the research. The research was conducted in a public hospital. The universe of the research is composed of 444 persons except the physicians working at the hospital and the sampling is 236 people. A simple random sampling method was used in the study. The limit of the research is that it is only done in a public hospital. Demographic information such as gender, age, marital status, education status, occupation, duration of institutional work were used as data collection tools. In this research, “Ethical Climate Questionnaire” developed by Cullen, Victor and Branson (1993) and adapted to Turkish by Eser (2007) and “Informal Communication Scale” developed by U？urlu (2014) were used in this research. For statistical analysis of research data, SPSS 23.0 package program was used. Findings and Conclusion: In this study, it was found that informal communication affected ethical climate perception. The majority of people involved in this work in a public hospital are women, married people, people over 30 years old and nurses. In the study conducted, there were differences according to marital status in terms of ethical climate perception. It has been determined that there are differences according to marital status, occupation and age by informal communication. Employees with high ethical climate perceptions are thought to be able to inform management when they encounter an unethical situation, using formal and informal communication channels. Although the perception of informal communication is negative, it is predicted that informal communication can act positively with the high level of ethical climate perception in the institution