IMA's code of ethics: An empirical examination of viewpoints of certified management accountants

Public confidence is central to the existence of a profession. Professionalism calls for a commitment to honorable behavior. The code of ethics for management accountants was adopted in 1983. A study conducted two years later provided an operational definition of ethics for management accountants. Since that time, many environmental changes have taken place that may have changed management accountant's views regarding ethics.;This study sought to determine whether views have changed since the previous study, and to examine another issue: whether practitioners' and educators' views differ with respect to ethics for management accountants. Thus, the focus was on two groups of certified management accountants, practitioners and educators.;The study's methodology included two phases. The developmental phase utilized Flanagan's Critical Incidents Technique. It consisted of unstructured personal interviews with professional management accountants (practitioners and educators) to obtain categories of ethics for management accountants and a list of ethical and unethical behaviors related to each category. This phase generated 45 behaviors not included in the previous study. No new categories of ethics were found. The information gathered in this phase was combined with the information from the earlier study to yield seven categories and 364 behaviors.;These behaviors were randomly assigned to seven versions of the questionnaire, which comprised the second phase of the study. Questionnaires were mailed to a random sample of practicing CMAs and to the population of CMA-educators listed in the Accounting Faculty Directory. The results, which included six categories and 185 specific ethical/unethical behaviors, were compared for practitioners and educators, and for the current versus the previous study.;The findings of the previous study were supported. In both studies, all categories of IMA's code were supported except for objectivity. In addition, supervision was found to be a dimension of ethics for management accountants in both the current and the previous studies. Significant differences between comparison groups were found for some behaviors. Also, it was found that CMAs view IMA's code as being marginally helpful in resolving ethical issues.