How does ethics reform in government affect moral reasoning and perceived discretion in patronage-prone organizations?

While ethics reforms have become integral to contemporary public management, their consequences for organizational behavior remain insufficiently theorized. Bringing together organizational control theory and ethical climate theory-two perspectives developed largely in isolation-this study examines how ethics reform shapes discretion and moral reasoning in public organizations. Leveraging South Korea's 2022 Conflict of Interest Act, we apply coarsened exact matching with a difference-in-differences design to survey data from 4,138 civil servants. Following the reform, civil servants in patronage-prone organizations exhibit lower perceived discretion and higher moral reasoning than the control group. These findings point to a dual mechanism: control-based mechanisms reshape discretion, while climate-based mechanisms strengthen ethical competence.