Evaluación de riesgos ergonómicos

The research areas covered by the thesis are substantial. A study of the factors affecting ethical decision-making can be investigated from the view points of various disciplines such as ethical theory and applied ethics disciplines such as professional ethics, business ethics and management ethics. It also incorporates elements of organisational behaviour, social science and psychology.

In addition, to explain fully the context of this study, the literature associated with numerous other disciplines was reviewed, including the literature on corporate governance and stakeholder theory; the legal and professional standards that are currently associated with financial planning advice; the international approach to financial planning advice and the current anecdotal ethical issues within financial planning.

An empirical study such as this, cannot deal with all of the variables and possible combinations of relationships associated with ethical decision making that were identified from the literature. Rather, it is confined to an exploration of specific individual, situational and contextual factors that influence the ethical decision making of two respondent groups within financial planning organisations, namely financial planners and compliance officers.

The study concerns itself with measuring the level of cognitive ethical reasoning of financial planners in their role as members of an emerging profession. It also examines the level of cognitive ethical reasoning of compliance officers; in their role of monitoring and supervising the financial advice of financial planners given on behalf of AFS Licensees. The effect of other individual correlates such as age, gender, experience, remuneration source and education level were also measured, so as to replicate in an Australian context, Bigel’s (1998) study on financial planners.

This study did not concern itself with other individual factors, such as religious beliefs, personal morality or values held by the respondents. Nor did it measure moral intensity (Hofmann Hoezl & Kirchler 2006) or the intentions and motivations of the respondents in decision making (Azjen 1991).

Further, it did not attempt to measure all of the contextual factors identified from the literature review as influencing ethical decision making, such as interaction with peers (Zey-Ferrell & Ferrell 1982) or authority figures (Lovisky, Trevino & Jacobs 2007). The study was confined to the measurement of ethical culture and ethical climate dimensions within financial services organisations and their relationship to other constructs such as ethical leadership, remuneration and role. It also attempted to identify some of the systems and procedures that these organisations have in place to assist with embedding ethical culture.

Further, this study did not examine the role of financial planning clients as investors and the ethical and moral reasoning they bring to investment decisions (Petrick & Quinn 1997). The investment behaviour of consumers is a study in itself. Nor did the study seek to explore whether ethical decision-making in financial planning advice extends to recommendations to clients to only invest in ethically or socially responsible companies or financial products.

This study is designed to enhance knowledge in the areas of applied professional and business ethics as each relates to ethical decision-making and the factors influencing it in the provision of financial advice to consumers of financial services.

In terms of the methodology, the research was conducted in five stages to ensure it was undertaken in a sequential manner. Stage one of the study comprised the literature review. Quantitative research methods were used in stage 2 of the research to review relevant decisions made by the three external decision makers, namely the Australian courts, ASIC and the Financial Ombudsman Service Ltd (FOS) in the years 2006 and 2007, to discern primary forms of unethical conduct by financial planning participants in the provision of financial advice. This stage included the collation and analysis of data related to the study’s case study on financial advice given to consumers to invest in Westpoint.

Qualitative research methods were utilised to convene the focus group in stage three of the research. The purpose of the focus group was to present a richer and more complex description of the perceptions and attitudes of the study’s participant groups to the current ethical issues facing them in their respective roles as financial planners and compliance officers and the factors that the participants believed may be influencing ethical decision-making in their organisations.

Stages two and three of the research were considered to be an integral part of the research design for a number of reasons. Given that this study measured the theoretical relationships between the ethical decision making of financial planning participants and numerous constructs (Abdolmohammadi & Sultan 2002), it was considered important to generate empirical data about these matters in their own right, so as to enhance understanding of the results from this study overall and for comparative analysis against the quantitative data collected from the main research instrument. In addition, data from stages two and three of the research design also instructed the development of the main questionnaire instrument, used in stage four of the project.

Stage four of the research comprised the development and pre-testing of the main research questionnaire. The purpose of the questionnaire was to collect quantitative data against which to measure the nine hypotheses posed by the thesis. Each of the four sections of the research instrument was based on instruments used in earlier studies in related contexts.

The four sections of the questionnaire included a demographic survey, based on Bigel’s (1998) study in section one; a survey of the systems and procedures AFS Licensees may have in place to embed ethical culture, in section two of the questionnaire; an ethical climate and culture survey based on the research of Trevino, Butterfield and McCabe (1998) in section three and the FAIT instrument in section four of the questionnaire.

The fifth stage of the study involved the collection and analysis of the data from the responses to the main research questionnaire. In testing the nine hypotheses proposed by this study and to achieve the study’s objectives, a number of different methods of data analysis were applied, including descriptive statistics, Pearson’s product-moment

correlation co-efficient, Spearman’s correlation co-efficient, ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions and hierarchical regressions. Correlation and regression analysis were chosen as the primary methods of data analysis for the purposes of this study because they are based on linear method, depend on normality assumptions and do not test for causality (Hansen & Morrow 2003).