An empirical investigation into the corporate culture of UK listed banks
Journal of Financial Regulation and Compliance
ISSN: 1358-1988
Article publication date: 12 February 2018
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to report new research into how small groups of people – officers, directors and managers – are guiding the governance, design and delivery of conduct and culture programmes at UK listed banks.
Design/methodology/approach
The research spanned two whole years between 2014 and 2015. The method involved some 30 face-to-face semi-structured meeting interviews. A pre-agreed template was used to score and write detailed notes. From many repetitions, themes and cross-interview commonalities, a rich set of findings evolved.
Findings
Banks that made the most improvement during the investigation activated culture predominantly within the business. Centring the culture programme within the business was associated with a focus on the middle and the grassroots level of the organisation. Banks that made least improvement activated culture principally “from the top”. Centring the culture programme at the top was associated with a focus on control, conformance and structure. The finding of relatively greater performance when culture programmes were activated within the business contrasts sharply with recommendations from regulators and conventional wisdom that the establishment of corporate culture is necessarily a top down exercise.
Originality/value
Culture is intangible, and as such often overlooked, and this research contributes to that gap in knowledge through insight and evidence based on direct empirical analysis. This work ranks banks differently than published corporate governance and sustainability ranking from third-party service providers, suggesting a focus on culture performance contributes a different perspective to that based on more available public information for corporate governance.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Ashley Claxton Hamilton from Royal London Asset Management for her help and support, as well as to the many practitioners who have generously given their time and insight in the course of the engagements. All opinions are those of the authors.
Citation
Cox, P. and Soobiah, D. (2018), "An empirical investigation into the corporate culture of UK listed banks", Journal of Financial Regulation and Compliance, Vol. 26 No. 1, pp. 120-134. https://doi.org/10.1108/JFRC-06-2016-0048
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited