In Korea, the size of the private security industry has grown rapidly since
the enactment of the Security Business Act in 1976. Unfortunately, the
quantitative development has not been accompanied by the comparable
qualities, and this shortcoming can be attributed to different unethical
incidents caused by the private security officers. This study examined the
causal relationship between the organizational characteristics according to the
organizational ethics and the organizational citizenship behavior to provide
suggestions to promote the ethics of the private security officers, and
ultimately play the role of a theoretical foundation for the qualitative
advancement of the industry.
Private security officers in Seoul and the Gyeonggi province in Korea were
studied by using the purposive sampling method and the following results were
obtained. First, except for the altruism factor, the levels of organizational
ethics perceptions and organizational citizenship behavior of the subjects were
relatively high. Moreover, organizational characteristics had a positive partial
effect on organizational ethics and organizational citizenship behavior.
Furthermore, organizational ethics partially affected organizational citizenship
behavior in a positive way, and organizational ethics had a partial mediation
effect between organizational characteristics and organizational citizenship
behavior. With the results of the analyses, development and management of
the ethics training and programs and promoting the ethics among the
executives were recommended as a future direction.