Corporate values of the 25 largest European banks: Exploring the ambiguous link with corporate scandals

Abstract

and actual values and ensuing behaviors of and within a firm-let alone the potentially different interpretations of abstract corporate value statements. In this paper, we set out to provide more clarity on what corporate values are, how they are inherently ambiguous, and how in practice they compare to firm involvement in scandals. For this purpose, we study the corporate values of the 25 largest European banks after the financial crisis. "Integrity" appeared to be the most common value among the 25 banks, followed by "customer focus." Nonetheless, over the past 6 years, 15 out of the 25 studied banks were involved in one or more scandals. Scandals can be systematic or caused by rogue employees, and benefitting the firm or their customers-in the latter case, providing an interesting interpretation of the customer focus value. Additionally, we found that courage or its synonyms were barely mentioned among banks' corporate values, potentially providing an additional explanation for the fast size of the financial crisis. Finally, we found that banks that had inclusive social principles such as respect, solidarity, and equality did not face large-scale scandals. between values leave ample room for interpretation (Berlin, 1996). In other words, the corporate value of profit seeking is very important but usually not the only and unbounded corporate value a firm wants to follow. In this respect, we consider the financial sector an interesting ground for study as the sector has come under close scrutiny in the past decade for an overemphasis on profit seeking-often portrayed as to the detriment to their customers and society. Such behavior could be considered a form of Mertonian innovation in which actors aim to achieve institutionalized goals but reject institutionalized means (Merton, 1957). By looking at the financial sector postcrisis, we attempt to study corporate values after a period of great uncertainty and volatility for this sector.Although most large corporations state their corporate values on their websites, the research into corporate values is rather scarce. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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