Do Wealth Managers Understand Codes of Conduct and Their Ethical Dilemmas? Lessons from an Online Survey
通过对一家大型跨国银行瑞士法人实体的财富管理员工进行在线调查，研究了他们对银行行为准则的理解与遵守情况，以及面对伦理困境时的决策倾向。
Abstract 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.