Ethical ideologies of finance practitioners: evidence from Nepalese banking and finance sector

This paper is developed on Karande et al.’s (2002) research design, also used by Fernando et al. (2008), to investigate the ethical ideologies of financial practitioners in Nepal and to examine the differences in idealism and relativism based on corporate ethical values, gender and age of the practitioners using structural equation model. The result shows that Nepalese finance practitioners are situationists (high idealism, high relativism), unlike other studies that found business professionals to be subjectivists (high idealism, low relativism). Likewise, corporate ethical value is found to be negatively related to idealism. Also, the result shows females are more idealistic than males and there are significant gender differences on both idealism and relativism. No significant age and education effect was reported on idealism but they were positively and significantly related to relativism. Likewise, experience and rank seem to positively (but not significantly) influence the ethical ideologies with greater effect on relativism.