Accounting firms’ talent management practices: perceived importance and its impact on auditors’ performance

Purpose Prior literature on talent management (TM) in the audit setting has suggested several practices that may affect auditors’ performance. However, the study is limited in terms of a measurable set of comprehensive constructs of TM in the audit setting, as well as the impact of comprehensive TM constructs on auditors’ performance. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine TM practices perceived to be important by auditors for auditors’ performance. Design/methodology/approach Data were obtained from 307 survey questionnaires received from auditors of large- as well as small- and medium-sized firms. Findings The study respondents perceived TM attributes related to supervision and review practices as the most vital for auditors’ performance. This category was followed by attributes related to ethics management practices along with training and development. The findings reveal that respondents generally perceived lower significance for attributes pertaining to work–life balance (WLB) and establishing a TM policy for auditors’ performance. While both top management and staff members of audit firms regarded WLB and establishing a TM policy to be of lower significance, top management placed greater importance on attributes related to ethics management, while staff perceived training and development attributes to be more critical. Originality/value This study examined a comprehensive set of TM practices (establishing a TM policy, recruitment, ethics management, training and development, supervision and review, remuneration, WLB and succession planning) and assessed the perceptions of audit practitioners on the significance of these practices on auditors’ performance.

Care Ethics Management and Redesign Organization in the New Normal

The pandemic period has placed the organizations in a state of great tension. It has generated a situation of confusion, lack of rules, and production-related criticalities that have called into question the very existence of many productive realities. This article aims to highlight the dimensions of care and ethics put in place by HR managers in COVID-19. The objective that animated the authors have focused on the HRM level of medium and large companies in Italy to highlight the protective actions toward people and the organization in the period COVID 19, highlighting what were the ethical values and actions of care put in place. In this article, we wanted to give voice to managers (N = 45, including 21 women and 24 men, aged between 40 and 55 years old) who had management tasks in their organizations by asking them to tell us how they dealt with the challenges imposed by the emergency. In the research, we start from a way of understanding workplaces understood as a “process of ongoing social relationship” within which the HR function is dedicated to the care of the quality of relationships. HR managers have to manage a complex role of mediating between the interests of people and employers by trying to find good mediations.

Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty?

In a competitive business environment, dishonesty can pay. Self-interested executives and managers can have incentive to shade the truth for personal gain. In response, the business community has considered how to commit these executives and managers to a higher ethical standard. The MBA Oath and the Dutch Bankers Oath are examples of such a commitment device. The question we test herein is whether the oath can be used as an effective form of ethics management for future executives/managers—who for our experiment we recruited from a leading French business school—by actually improving their honesty. Using a classic Sender-Receiver strategic game experiment, we reinforce professional identity by pre-selecting the group to which Receivers belong. This allows us to determine whether taking the oath deters lying among future managers. Our results suggest “yes and no.” We observe that these future executives/managers who took a solemn honesty oath as a Sender were (a) significantly more likely to tell the truth when the lie was detrimental to the Receiver, but (b) were not more likely to tell the truth when the lie was mutually beneficial to both the Sender and Receiver. A joint product of our design is our ability to measure in-group bias in lying behavior in our population of subjects (comparing behavior of subjects in the same and different business schools). The experiment provides clear evidence of a lack of such bias.

Making Behavioral Ethics Research More Useful for Ethics Management Practice: Embracing Complexity Using a Design Science Approach

Research on behavioral ethics is thriving and intends to offer advice that can be used by practitioners to improve the practice of ethics management. However, three barriers prevent this research from generating genuinely useful advice. It does not sufficiently focus on interventions that can be directly designed by management. The typical research designs used in behavioral ethics research require such a reduction of complexity that the resulting findings are not very useful for practitioners. Worse still, attempts to make behavioral ethics research more useful by formulating simple recommendations are potentially very damaging. In response to these limitations, this article proposes to complement the current behavioral ethics research agenda that takes an ‘explanatory science’ approach with a research agenda that uses a ‘design science’ approach. Proposed by Joan van Aken and building on earlier work by Herbert Simon, this approach aims to develop field-tested ‘design propositions’ that present often complex but useful recommendations for practitioners. Using a ‘CIMO-logic’, these propositions specify how an ‘intervention’ can generate very different ‘outcomes’ through various ‘mechanisms’, depending on the ‘context’. An illustration and a discussion of the contours of this new research agenda for ethics management demonstrate its advantages as well as its feasibility. The article concludes with a reflection on the feasibility of embracing complexity without drowning in a sea of complicated contingencies and without being paralyzed by the awareness that all interventions can have both desirable and undesirable effects.

Cultivating Patriotism—A Pioneering Note on a Russian Dimension of Corporate Ethics Management

Corporate codes of conduct address various issues, some of which can be country-specific. A tentative analysis of the content of 42 codes of the leading Russian private companies implies that about a quarter of them consider patriotism, which generally matches the significant attention paid to this issue in Russian society. Of 10 companies with the biggest annual revenue, four (40%) consider patriotism in their codes. The main topics are pride in a company’s relevance to state development, initiatives, and interests, as well as care for the veterans of the World War II. The present study implies that patriotism can be an important dimension of corporate ethics management in some countries.

Rereading the Mathnawi of Mawlana Jalal Al Din Rumi from the standpoint of ethics management in the public sector

It is widely believed that a virtuous state always commits to uphold and consistently implement ethical values. If ethics cannot be maintained in the public sector, it would drive unethical behaviors of public officials that ultimately damage the public reputation and cause nepotism, irregularities, waste of public resources, loss of lives and properties, etc. Meanwhile, implementing ethical values into practice for public sector management requires a systematical approach and policies. Since the culture of a nation also influences people's behaviors, thus the role of cultural values should be considered in the management of ethical values in the public sector. This study examines the masterpiece work of Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi, The Mathnawi, as an example of a cultural resource. This study has two main purposes: Firstly, it aims to raise awareness about the advice of Mawlana Jalaleddin Rumi regarding the essentials of ethical management in the public sector through Mathnawi. The second aim is to encourage readers to analyze and evaluate their own cultural resources to understand and implement the ethical management philosophies they envisage through a systematic perspective. This study argues that the core elements of Mathnawi with supporting local cultural values can play a crucial role in strengthening the practice of ethical management in public sector organizations. Therefore, it can be said that Mathnawi includes advice regarding the key essentials of ethics management.

A Review of Corporate Purpose: An Approach to Actioning the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This journal article explores Corporate Purpose as an approach to action the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It achieves this objective by presenting a review of existing literature on Corporate Purpose and SDGs from the disciplines of business ethics, management studies, economics and psychology. The review showcases contributions exploring whether and how Corporate Purpose-led strategy facilitates the operationalization of the SDGs and proposes an emerging research agenda. This article employed an inductive approach methodology through grounded theory to develop a critical analysis of scientific evidence-based work for theory construction on Corporate Purpose. One of the major findings of this review is that to achieve the SDGs companies need to shift found from the “business as usual” approach, which perceives sustainability as an externality, to incorporating sustainability factors in the company’s underlying purpose. The article also (1) identifies trends in research outputs and reveals five major antecedents of the phenomenon (drivers to purpose), (2) identifies key gaps within the existing literature, (3) distinguishes three current approaches to Corporate Purpose and (4) elaborates on current theories of Corporate Purpose and SDGs linkages to identify opportunities and aid future research. In summary, this article unpacks Corporate Purpose mechanisms to action the SDGs and stimulates academic discussion of business transformational approaches to long-standing sustainability challenges.

Pengaruh Kompetensi, Etika Profesional dan Proses Pengendalian Manajemen terhadap Akuntabilitas Kinerja dan Fraud Akademik Akuntan Pendidik di Perguruan Tinggi Swasta Wilayah DKI Jakarta

This research was intended to examined about the influence of competencies, professional ethics and management control process on performance accountability and academic fraud of teaching accountant. The study was conducted by survey method. The data used in this research were primary data collected by questioners. Based on the results of data analysis and discussion, it was obtained the following research findings: 1) the influence of the competencies, professional ethics and management control process on performance accountability are positive and not significant; 2) the influence of the competencies, professional ethics, management control process and performance accountability on academic fraud of teaching accountant are negative and significant