Hungarian Managers Behave Badly for the Good of the Company – Study

Hungarian managers see corruption as a means to doing the best they can for their businesses rather than as a way of gaining direct personal benefits, a new study claims, blogs.wsj.com reports.

The study, which involved some 870 mid- to top-ranking executives in the private and public sectors of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, is due to be published in November.

The blogs.wsj.com said, the researchers wanted to see how attitudes toward ethical values affect management behavior. Levels of corruption are a key determinant of the business environment in every country. The quality of the local business environment strongly affects a country’s ability to attract investors, particularly from abroad. The more corrupt a country is the less investment it is likely to draw in. Foreign direct investment has been a major economic driver in emerging market economies, including central and Eastern Europe.

“The human factor is significant here–individual values and value systems,” said Aron Perenyi, PhD, a lecturer at the faculty of business and enterprise at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia and the coordinator of the research project.

According to blogs.wsj.com, Czech managers generally disapprove of negative behavior while Slovak managers despise bad management, the study found. Poland leads the pack in terms of ethical behaviour. Managers there were found to be constantly monitoring business issues and opportunities, evaluating new technologies and are open to life-long learning that correlated with positive behavior. In Hungary, managers know what counts as bad management practice but weren’t constrained organizationally to behave well.

Read more HERE.

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/