Ethical Behaviors and Merit-Based Professional Management Systems of Business Organizations: Turkey-European Union Comparison

This study compares the prevalence of ethical behaviors and merit-based professional management systems of business organizations in Turkey and 15 European Countries (EU-15) covering the founders and initial members of the European Union. In the study, a 12-year dataset of Executive Opinion Survey conducted globally by World Economic Forum was used. On the ethical behaviors of organizations, in the survey, executives are asked to rate the extent of corporate ethics of companies in their countries regarding the interactions with public officials, politicians, and other businesses. Merit-based professional management system ranked by executives is based on a question about whether relatives and friends or qualified professional managers hold senior management positions of organizations in executives’ countries. The scores range between 1 and 7 that 1 refers to the worst practice (extremely poor ethical behavior and no merit in manager selection) and 7 refers to best practice (excellent ethical behavior and merit-based qualified manager selection). Scores of countries are compared based on the annually weighed means of survey scores in country-level. Results reveal that in both business ethics and professional management systems, Turkey has scores varying around the world means those are far below of the EU-15 countries. Nevertheless, as the worst performers among the EU-15 countries, scores of Greece and Italy are lower than those of Turkey