The Ethical Behaviours of Final Year Turkish Accountancy Students Compared with Their Australian and Irish Counterparts

Abstract

Business ethics is the application of ethical principles to manage complex dilemmas. Business ethics asks, "What is right and wrong and good and bad?" in business transactions. Ethical solutions may have more than one, or no "right" alternative (Yalcin et al., 2000). In this study, ethical attitudes of Turkish accounting students are compared to the results of O'Leary and Cotter (2000), regarding Australian and Irish students. Turkey is a developing country while Australia and Ireland are developed, and the countries differ on a number of cultural variables. Thus ethical attitudes may be expected to differ significantly. Despite the wealth and cultural variables that might suggest higher unethical behaviour of students from Turkey, the opposite results were obtained. As in other studies, however, males were found to be more likely to take unethical actions. Finally, collectivism did have some effect on how students would behave if refusing the unethical offer came from a friend.

Keywords: business ethics, cultural differences, Turkey, developing countries, collectivism, bribery, academic intergrity, Australia, Ireland, unethical behavior, accounting students, accounting education

JEL Classification: M19, M14, M40, M41