A poor ethical culture has been considered one of the reasons for the emergence of many corporate governance scandals. In this paper, I investigate the link between ethical culture and the composition of the board of directors for a sample of Brazilian companies. My measure of ethical culture is based on a text analysis of around 50,000 employee reviews posted at Glassdoor for over 1,400 terms related to five ethical dimensions: organizational trust, ethical leadership, benevolent orientation, empathy, and speaking out & efficacy. I find partial support for the hypotheses that a higher ratio of independent directors and of women on boards are associated with better ethical culture. My strong results, in turn, refer to a corporate governance feature little discussed in the literature: the percentage of board members appointed by minority shareholders. In this case, all models exhibit a strong negative relationship between the ratio of such directors and ethical culture. To my knowledge, this is the first paper to document a link between ethical culture and corporate governance mechanisms.

不良的道德文化被认为是许多公司治理丑闻出现的原因之一。在本文中，我以巴西公司为样本调查了道德文化与董事会组成之间的联系。我对道德文化的衡量是基于对 Glassdoor 上发布的大约 50,000 条员工评论的文本分析，其中涉及 1,400 多个与五个道德维度相关的术语：组织信任、道德领导、仁慈取向、同理心以及畅所欲言和效率。我发现部分支持以下假设，即更高的独立董事和董事会中的女性比例与更好的道德文化有关。反过来，我的有力结果是指文献中很少讨论的公司治理特征：少数股东任命的董事会成员的百分比。在这种情况下，所有模型都表现出此类董事的比例与道德文化之间存在强烈的负相关关系。据我所知，这是第一篇记录道德文化与公司治理机制之间联系的论文。