Code of Conduct for Top Management and Board: An Exploratory Study on Indian Listed Firms

Abstract

In the late 2000s, the Indian market regulator made it mandatory for the listed Indian companies to have a code of conduct for the board members and the top management. However, no significant study has been done to understand the content of the code of conduct documents. This article does an exploratory analysis of the content of the listed Indian firms’ code of conduct document. We hand-collected the corporate code of ethics (CCE) documents of the top 100 listed Indian firms (excluding financial service firms) and analysed the content using a structured instrument and arrived at an index. Our analysis found that ‘conduct on behalf of the firm’ and ‘conduct against the firm’ are the parameters on which the CCE contents focused on. We found significant differences in the content CCE of Indian firms based on the controlling ownership category. However, there were no differences between the CCE content of the firms across industries.