Is More Satisfied More Ethical? The Impact of Job Satisfaction on the Professional Ethics' Attitude of Polish and Austrian Property Valuers

In this paper we start from the observation that various features of the profession and of the service they provides makes property valuers particularly vulnerable to principal-agent-issues. Positioned between regulations, interests of their clients, and their own business needs, property valuers constantly have to decide how to balance these often conflicting demands.We argue in this paper that job satisfaction is an important prerequisite for property valuers to act ethically. Or, said differently, a valuer who is not satisfied with her/his job is more likely to bend the rules and regulations in order to gain some unjustified advantage. We analyze this relationship empirically based on surveys conducted in both Poland and Austria. This allows the comparison between two rather different regulatory regimes: the Austrian one which goes back over a century and defines the basic framework of the valuers' work, and the Polish one which is fairly new and comparatively much more detailed. We use established measures for job satisfaction and for ethical attitude in the survey. The study shows that there is a positive relationship between job satisfaction and ethical attitude. Other factors that influence ethics are the segment in which the valuer mainly works and the country. Valuers in Austria tend to express higher ethical attitudes than their colleagues in Poland.