Examining the effect of professional ethics of accountants in promoting new styles of financial leadership

Master's Thesis in Accounting (M.A)

Abstract

The topic of ethics and practicing professional ethics is one of the serious and important topics in the field of accounting, which directly affects the honesty and ability of accountants to gain public trust. Especially, the lack of correct and ethical training can lead to fraudulent activities. Therefore, the importance of the research was because the accounting profession is one of the most difficult and disciplined professions and because of the useful and effective services and information that it provides to managers in the direction of decision-making, planning, leadership and control of the organization's activities, it should have a special credibility and importance that can be achieved in the shadow of professional ethics by accountants. Therefore, in this research, the effect of professional ethics of accountants on the improvement and development of new styles of financial leadership was investigated. The statistical population of the research includes supervisors, senior supervisors, managers and certified accountants employed in the first level audit institutions of the Tehran Stock Exchange and Securities Organization in 2013. The required information in relation to the statistical population was extracted through the website of the Tehran Stock Exchange and Securities Organization and the website of the Society of Certified Accountants. In the current research, two questionnaires were used to check the variables and assumptions. The first questionnaire has 24 questions and the second questionnaire has 29 questions, which were distributed simultaneously and in the form of a questionnaire among 350 supervisors, senior supervisors, managers and official accountants in the recruitment of institutions, which were determined with the help of Karjesi and Morgan table, and finally 291 questionnaires were completed and collected without defects for statistical analysis. To check the status of the variables and ask for opinions about the relationship between the variables according to the first questionnaire, one-sample t-test was used and to check the research hypotheses according to the second questionnaire, the multiple regression test was used in spss software and structural equation modeling was used to fit the model with LISREL 8.50 software. The results of the first questionnaire show the significant relationship between the variables and the desirability of the variables. Also, the findings from the second questionnaire show the confirmation of the research hypotheses. So that all the research hypotheses were confirmed after analyzing the data using the above tests, which shows the importance of compliance with professional ethics by accountants and its effect on the promotion of new styles of financial leadership of managers.

Keywords: ethics, professional ethics, new styles of financial leadership

Chapter One

General Research

1-1 Introduction

The topic of ethics and practicing professional ethics is one of the serious and important topics in the field of accounting. What this means is that in addition to personal interests and motivations that are necessary for human life, and in some cases can lead to the improvement of the situation in society, other things such as moral values, maximizing the social benefit that ultimately accrues to the society, as well as paying attention to human and social principles and norms can help to improve the state of society and prosperity as much as possible and build a more civilized country. Morality is very important in human life because humanity is formed when moral values ??are crystallized in his existence. Every human being is evaluated according to the degree of emergence of moral values ??in his thoughts, speech and behavior. The first manifestation of a person in the society is that person's morals. This importance also enters into business, and accounting professional ethics is an important issue that directly affects the honesty and ability of accountants to gain public trust. Especially, the lack of correct and ethical training can lead to fraudulent activities. Therefore, in this research, it is decided to investigate the impact of professional accounting ethics on the improvement and development of new styles of financial leadership. This change is clearly visible in all aspects of human life.. The category of accounting and the developments and changes in accounting are not excluded from this category, so that among the topics that have always been taken into account are financial topics and topics related to the accounting profession. Accounting is a human invention and a result of human agreements. As it is clear from the definition of accounting, accounting is a set of rules and methods that, by applying them, the financial and economic information of an institution is collected, classified and summarized in the form of accounting reports, and is provided to interested and interested parties for decision making. These people can be informed about the financial status, operation results and also the future perspective of the institution. On the other hand, as we know, the characteristics of each profession are: 1- acceptance of the duty to serve the society 2- the existence of minimum pre-determined conditions for entering the desired profession, such as specialized skills that are obtained through training and experience. 3- adherence of the members of the profession to the sets of principles, rules and values ??related to that profession (Ali Madd, 2015). Since ethics [1] in business is one of the parts of applied ethics and professional ethics [2] is also a subset of business ethics [3], it is better to discuss this profession from the perspective of professional ethics. Professional ethics include rules and acceptable methods that are used in a profession. Professional ethics is mentioned as a knowledge that methodically explains appropriate and correct behavior in any profession and provides practical and practical guidelines in order to determine the limits of responsibilities (Bayat, 2017). So that the behavioral and ethical standards of each profession are considered as the most important policies of that profession. Therefore, some ethical standards should be observed with more precision and sensitivity. On the other hand, regardless of what the goals of the organization under the management of the managers are, managers are usually involved in four main activities in the efforts they make to achieve the goals of the organization. And according to the four goals of management accounting, which is aimed at helping the manager to achieve the strategic goals of the organization and provides managers with useful information for decision-making, planning, leading activities, and control. And considering the importance of information provided by management accountants, which improves and makes correct decisions by managers in various fields, including finance. To what extent accountants pay special attention to professional ethics in the importance of the information they provide is a significant point.

As it is known, the accounting unit is considered as one of the departments of the organization. This department, like other departments, will be under supervision and leadership so that it can synchronize with other units of the organization in order to achieve the organization's major goals. Researchers have stated that leadership is the ability to influence the attitudes, abilities and beliefs of employees in order to achieve organizational goals. Although leadership has been a main topic among researchers for several years, but due to the significant social changes that have occurred during the last two decades, it has caused the discussion of leadership and its new styles to show themselves more (Doquette and McFarlane [4], 2003). Servant and transformational leadership styles, which are modern leadership styles, have many similarities due to the same root and basis. This research, while defining and expressing each style, describes the characteristics of these two styles and examines the impact of accountants' professional ethics in promoting the use and application of these styles. According to the explanations provided, the main issue of the research is: "What effect can the observance of professional ethics by accountants have in promoting new leadership styles in the financial sector?"

1-3 Importance of the research topic

Progress has always been the concern of accountants in issues related to ethics and compliance with professional ethics, which arises over time. The importance of this issue is that the accounting profession is one of the most structured and disciplined professions in the world. This profession should have a certain credibility and trust due to the type and nature of the services it provides.