Ethical culture as a predictor of late payments

Poor payment discipline has been a constant problem faced by European companies and has only deteriorated with the current global economic crisis. Even though new legislation has been adopted several times on the European level, the situation has not changed in favor of improved payment discipline. This research aims to determine the correlation between ethical culture of the company and how it influences its payments.

The factor structure of Kaptein’s (2008) instrument for measuring ethical culture was analyzed using principal component analysis with varimax rotation. This factor analysis yielded six factors with eigenvalues over 1.00. The reliabilities of the single constructs were as follows: clarity (α = 0.891), feasibility (α = 0.918), discussability (α = 0.955), supportability (α = 0.956), sanctionability (α = 0.879) and transparency (α = 0.801). These six factors explained 78 per cent of the total variance. All six factors were named according to Kaptein’s (2008) proposal, whose factor analysis yielded, in addition to the six factors, the following two factors: “Congruence of supervisors” and “Congruence of management”. Both factors represent the ethical culture dimension that Kaptein (1998) called “Congruence”, which refers to the extent to which superiors’ and managers’ acts are in line with their ethics on the declarative level.

The results showed that two dimensions of ethical culture, sanctionability and feasibility, improve payment discipline.

The results of this study provide an important link between ethical culture and late payments. However, the research has some limitations. The first limitation is the response rate of only 9.1 per cent. The next limitation is geographical location; the results in other European countries could be different. The third limitation of the research arises from the data collection, because ethical culture was evaluated by one person from each enterprise, and the average payment delay was also calculated based only on a sample of invoices. Future research should therefore attempt to confirm the correlation between ethical culture and payment discipline in other European countries. It would be interesting to compare finds among different European countries, to determine whether there are major differences among companies in the field of payment discipline.

Good payment discipline can be defined as settling obligations to the customer on time. Late payments have been one of the biggest problems in many European economies. Trade credit becomes even more important during economic crises (Guariglia and Mateut, 2006), when investments are in decline, trading volume is reduced, bank credit is harder to obtain and interest rates are increased (Vojinović et al., 2013; Lin and Martin, 2010). Because customers do not fulfill their obligations on time, even enterprises with healthy sales growth encounter cash flow problems (Tsai, 2011). This paper’s empirical research has been implemented in Slovenia because it has some of the worst payment disciplines among European countries. Such research is unique in Slovenia as well as wider.