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Unethical behavior in the financial sector is a common and costly phenomenon. The main purpose of this study was to examine how ethical board leadership in the financial sector relates to the ethical climate and incidents of unethical workplace behavior. Surprisingly few studies have examined whether ethical leadership of the top management of organizations relates to lower levels of unethical behavior displayed by organizational members at the work floor. Moreover, the few existing studies have used generic measures of ethical leadership which provide little insight into concrete and visible leadership behaviors that should be displayed by board members to build an ethical climate. Building on Ethical Leadership Theory, Signaling Theory, and the Social Identity Theory of Leadership, we examined whether employees’ perceptions of the board’s commercial focus, unjustified board pay and the board’s focus on consumers’ interests related to an instrumental ethical climate in financial organizations, and indirectly to the incidence of observed unethical behavior. The Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets collaborated with the authors of this paper to develop an online survey. At the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, the survey was distributed in 18 organizations, which operated in four subsectors of the Dutch financial sector (four banks, four insurance companies, five financial intermediary companies, and five funeral insurance companies). The survey was completed by 4,144 employees in total. We do not think that the Dutch context is unique, although after the financial crisis, Dutch behavioral codes came to the fore which stated that …