EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Recognizing Ethical Issues: An Examination of Practicing Industry Accountants and Accounting Students

Krista Fiolleau () and Steven E. Kaplan ()
Additional contact information
Krista Fiolleau: University of Waterloo
Steven E. Kaplan: Arizona State University

Journal of Business Ethics, 2017, vol. 142, issue 2, No 8, 259-276

Abstract: Abstract It has long been recognized that accountants practicing in business settings have a dual role: (1) as employees, they are bound to the organization, and (2) as professionals, they are bound by the profession’s code of ethical conduct (Westra, Journal of Business Ethics 5(2): 119–128, 1986). These two roles highlight the need to recognize and consider both the ethical and economic implications of their decisions. Practicing industry accountants are commonly involved in a broad range of their firm’s business practices and decision making, and are increasingly exposed to the commercial aspects of their companies. Also, during their education, they were trained on their professional responsibilities. However, in general, this education was not recent and may not have been reinforced. By contrast, accounting students have been recently and repeatedly exposed to and have knowledge about their professional responsibilities as an accountant, but limited, if any, exposure to the commercial aspects of business. Consequently, our first hypothesis predicts that the ethical sensitivity of practicing industry accountants will be lower than that of accounting students. We find limited support for this hypothesis. Second, we also examine company reward structure and predict that ethical sensitivity will be lower for those in a company with a reward structure narrowly focused only on financial goals as compared to those in a company with a broad reward structure (e.g., including rewards for both financial and non-financial goals). Third, we predict that the difference in ethical sensitivity levels between those in a company with a narrow reward structure as compared to those in a company with a broad financial reward structure will be higher for practicing industry accountants compared to accounting students. Results from our study generally support these last two predictions. Ethical sensitivity is lower for those in a company with a reward structure narrowly focused only on financial goals as compared to those in a company with a broad reward structure, suggesting that companies may be able to increase ethical awareness in their organizations by including non-financial goals in their reward structures.

Keywords: Earnings management; Ethical awareness; Ethical sensitivity; Rewards structure; Professionalism; Professional identity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-016-3154-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:142:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s10551-016-3154-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-016-3154-2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:142:y:2017:i:2:d:10.1007_s10551-016-3154-2