The business culture in the banking sector implicitly favours dishonest behaviour among employees, finds a study carried out by the University of Zurich’s Department of Economics involving nearly 200 bank employees.
Among the 200 bank employeesinvolved in the study, 128 were from a large international bank while 80 were from other banks.
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In the study, each participant was randomly classified under one of two experimental conditions, including the experimental group and the control group.
In the experimental group, participants were reminded of their occupational role as well as related behavioral norms with appropriate questions, while control group participants were reminded of their non-occupational role in their leisure time and the associated norms.
All the participants were then asked to complete a task that would help raise their income by up to $200 if they behaved dishonestly, which revealed that participants in the experimental group behaved significantly more dishonestly.
This was followed by a very similar study conducted with employees from various other industries, who will divided into experimental and control groups.
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By GlobalDataHowever, unlike the employees of banking industry, these employees were not more dishonest when reminded of their occupational role.
Michel Maréchal, Professor for Experimental Economic Research at the University of Zurich, said "Our results suggest that the social norms in the banking sector tend to be more lenient towards dishonest behavior and thus contribute to the reputational loss in the industry."
Recommending measures to address the issue, Alain Cohn, a postdoctoral scholar at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, said, "The banks could encourage honest behavior by changing the industry’s implicit social norms. Several experts and supervisory authorities suggest, for example, that bank employees should take a professional oath, similar to the Hippocratic Oath for physicians."
