Do wealth managers understand codes of conduct and their ethical dilemmas? Lessons from an online survey - new publication by Rajna Gibson Brandon and Ewa Lombard
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, GFRI's Professors Rajna Gibson Brandon and Ewa Lombard conduct a non-incentivized online survey with wealth management employees of the Swiss legal entity of a large multinational bank. They propose a method to estimate the comprehension and the level of expected adherence to the CoC principles that they test with their sample.
They 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, their 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.
The paper has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Business Ethics.
Feb 15, 2023