Professor Elizabeth Sheedy on Behaviour in Banking

Why do people who work in banks engage in bad behaviour? That's the question my guest on this episode, Professor Elizabeth Sheedy of Macquarie University in Sydney, specialises in researching. She is a risk management expert based in the Department of Applied Finance and since 2012 her research focus has been on Risk Governance, Culture and Remuneration in Financial Institutions. So she's ideally placed to explore why there appears to be such an issue with behaviour in Financial Services. In our discussion, we talk about why bad behaviour occurs and what we can do to mitigate it. What are the factors that drive people to engage in it? Would it make a difference if the industry were more diverse?


You'll find links to her research below.

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This major study of risk culture in Australian and Canadian banks, highlights the issue of ‘avoidance’ culture in predicting poor behaviour: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/corg.12200


How both remuneration and culture predict compliance behaviour: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378426619301864

What is the potential of compensation deferrals to temper bad behaviour? Will people gravitate towards the pay structures they prefer? Will the nature of the workforce change if deferrals are introduced? https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3535347


This research explores the "Lehman Sisters" hypothesis, which posited that had Lehman Brothers been run by women, that things might have turned out differently. The research suggests the opposite; it turns out senior females in banks are pretty similar to their male counterparts.: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/MF-11-2017-0465/full/html?casa_token=Sw-pGQTHpz4AAAAA:fu38Nld8uqZWES3N5koN1byos6t44SKVRrURunfUD9DWgLIHZlZpBqVDSMfR7eGbS1_-dpG3jmim_gVGRYuyo7qI1r1MQw1b0YoHvloXIVh4eZVllUvp