Ethical climate in the Korean appraisal industry

Abstract

Although there are numerous research papers regarding the ethical climates of western countries (Victor and Gullen, 1987; Arnaud and Schminke, 2012), research findings regarding the ethical climate of Korea are relatively few or minute (Lee and Yoshihara, 1997). This paper is one of the pioneering efforts in the line of research on ethical work environment within the Korean property industry.We surveyed 322 certified Korean appraisers nationwide who are currently practicing their profession in 2018. We have three hypotheses: First, the older (and consequently, more experienced) the appraisers are, the more sympathetic they will be to clientele effects; Second, appraisers who have majored in management during their university years are more sensitive to profit than appraisers who have majored in other fields such as liberal arts, social science, engineering, and so on; Lastly, male appraisers value loyalty to people [Guanxi, as explained by Cheng and Wang (2015)] most highly, while female appraisers most highly value rationality, at least in Korea.We conjecture that certified Korean appraisers are clever enough to think of this survey as a sort of qualifying exam. They try their best to find the correct answers to obtain the perfect score as in a high school exam. Considering that there exists a “If I do it, it’s romance, but if you do it, it’s cheating” phenomenon in Korea as described by Lee and Yoshihara (1997), we need to improve our questionnaire to obtain credible and sound data of what we want to measure.