Abstract

Competitive advantage and longstanding survival of the banking sector do not depend only on market oriented service production but also on winning public confidence. The crucial condition of winning public confidence is to comply with ethical standards. In this respect, the main aim of this study is to determine the perceived ethical quality of commercial banks from the viewpoint of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Northern Cyprus. As a summary of the research, 21 ethical principles used in the research have been grouped into three factors for which perceived ethical behaviors were not satisfactory. Furthermore, regression analysis reveals that three ethical factors named “procedural justice”, “assurance” and “sensitivity” have an explanatory effect on their bank satisfaction while SMEs’ bank satisfaction have an explanatory effect on their word of mouth. Findings also indicated that only one of the demographıc characteristics, “education” yielded significant differences at the 0.01 level for “procedural justice” and 0.05 levels for “assurance” in disparity of perceived ethical factors.

Key words: Northern Cyprus, ethical quality, SMEs, bank satisfaction, word of mouth.