RT Article
T1 Do wealth managers understand codes of conduct and their ethical dilemmas?: lessons from an online survey
JF Journal of business ethics
VO 189
IS 3
SP 553
OP 572
A1 Lombard, Ewa
A1 Gibson Brandon, Rajna N.
LA English
PB Springer
YR 2024
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1878187732
AB How do wealth managers understand and comply with the social norms embedded in banks' codes of conduct (CoC), and how do they cope with ethical dilemmas? Do they have a tendency after the global financial crisis to prioritize banks’ financial security over clients' interests? To answer these and related questions, we conduct a nonincentivized online survey with wealth management employees of the Swiss legal entity of a large multinational bank. We propose a method to estimate the comprehension and the level of expected adherence to the CoC principles that we test with our sample. We further show that framing questions under the label of "Financial Security" increased response accuracy and that employees' honesty helped guide their decision-making toward integrity in ethical dilemmas. Thus, in addition to validating a method for testing the level of CoC comprehension and the expected adherence to its principles, our study is among the first to show that in the wealth management business, honesty and social injunctive norms defined in the bank’s CoC reinforce one another.
K1 Client interest
K1 code of conduct
K1 Corporate Governance
K1 ethical dilemmas
K1 Financial security
K1 G21
K1 G34
K1 G41
K1 Honesty
K1 Online survey
K1 Social norms
K1 Aufsatz in Zeitschrift
DO 10.1007/s10551-023-05372-6