Proceedings of 24th International Business Research Conference
12 - 13 December 2013, Planet Hollywood, Las Vegas, USA, ISBN: 978-1-922069-37-5
Attitudes toward Codes of Ethics: A Look at Denmark,
China, and the US
Tyler Yu, Sam Peppas, Stephanie Peppas and Miranda Zhang
The topic of business ethics has been in the spotlight of late with coverage of abuses in
the housing market, Libor-fixing, and failure to prevent money laundering being reported
by media around the world. It is clear that the questionable behavior in these cases is not
limited to individuals and businesses from a single country. As values are culture bound,
the decision of managers as related to whether to hire or do business with those from
another culture may be affected by perceptions of the ethicality of the individuals
themselves, the companies they work for, and also by perceptions of ethicality of the
culture in general.
In an attempt to curtail unethical behaviors, the approach of many businesses and
professional organizations across the globe has been to create corporate or industry
codes of ethics. For codes of ethics to be effective, however, those working in
organizations must buy into the notion that codes are worthwhile.
At the same time, academicians as well as business leaders around the world are
expressing their concern over the question of unethical behavior, with a resulting call for
additional cross cultural research. Further, it is the belief of some that attention should be
turned toward better understanding the thoughts of future managers and business leaders,
as it is their attitudes that will shape the direction of business in the years to come.
The purpose of this paper is to examine and compare the attitudes of business students
enrolled in Danish, Chinese, and US universities, so as to better understand the attitudes
of future generations of businesspeople living on three different continents with regard to
the perceived effects of the use of codes of ethics in business. It was hypothesized that
significant differences would exist in the perceptions of the three groups. It was believed
that if similarities and differences could be identified, industry and business leaders as well
as academicians would be in a better position to address the use of codes of ethics in
business.
Using a survey derived from Becker and Fritzsche, respondents were asked to assume
that an Ethical Practices Code had been drawn up by firms operating in the industry in
which they intended to work. They were then asked to indicate their levels of
disagreement/ agreement with seven statements relating to the possible consequences of
such a code. Responses were analyzed using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), which
calculated and compared mean scores for each statement for the Danish, Chinese, and
US groups. Tests of significance (the F-test at a 5% level of significance for Equality of
Means) were conducted to determine whether the differences were statistically significant.
Though there was no reason to believe the populations involved in the study were not
normally distributed, Kruskal-Wallis, a non-parametric alternative to ANOVA, was also
used. Given the unequal number of observations for the three samples it was believed
that the use of Kruskal-Wallis would provide procedural assurance. Further, the results of
the Kruskal-Wallis analysis could be compared to the results of ANOVA to check for
consistency of the results. Finally, Tukey’s Post Hoc LSD tests were also performed to
identify the pairwise differences, if any, in the sample data in terms of the ethical practices
code statements.
A summary of the empirical findings will be presented at the conference. The need for
future studies will also be identified based on the limitations of the study and suggestions
for future studies will be solicited during the presentation.
______________________________________________________
Dr. Sam Peppas, Professor of Marketing and International Business (speppas@ggc.edu), Ms. Stephanie
Peppas, Instructor of Business Quantitative Analysis (speppas1@ggc.edu), Dr. Tyler Yu, Professor of
Economics (tyu@ggc.edu), Dr. Miranda Zhang, Professor of Finance (mzhang@ggc.edu), All at School of
Business, Georgia Gwinnett College, 1000 University Center Lane, Lawrenceville, GA 30043