Complementary or competing climates? Examining the interactive effect of service and ethical climates on company-level financial performance.

By bending rules to please their customers, companies with high service climates may be less ethical but ultimately more profitable. In this article, we pose the question of whether being ethical comes at a cost to profits in customer-oriented firms. Despite the organizational reality that multiple climates coexist at a given time, research has largely ignored these types of questions, and the simultaneous analysis of multiple climate dimensions has received little empirical attention to date.