imacy of the profession), leading them to be more
receptive to the deployment of surveillance and
monitoring mechanisms as a way to control for
inappropriate professional behavior. More research is
needed in order to investigate further the relationship
between client and independence commitment
as well as the influence of commercialism on both
constructs. Client commitment may also be a more
complex notion than we originally expected.
The results also indicate that professional
accountants working in the French-speaking province
of Que´bec have a higher independence
commitment than their peers working in Englishspeaking
provinces (H3), thereby contributing to the
body of prior research that made visible linkages
between national culture and professional accounting
ethics. Although the difference could arguably
be due to legalism (the stricter regulatory re´gime),
law is nonetheless often a reflection of the societal
values and norms. Hence, an area of future research
would consist of relying on the cultural dichotomy
between collectivism and individualism to investigate
independence commitment in professional
accounting settings other than in Canada.
As with any research, this study has its limitations
and readers should be careful before generalizing the
results – either in time or space. First, our data is selfreport
data. Researchers can seek to extend our
work and develop further the concept of independence
commitment through the collection of other
types of data. Following Randall and Fernandes
(1991), however, we note that our methodology
adopted each of the mechanisms known to reduce
the influence of social desirability bias including
computer administration of the questionnaire,
ensured anonymity, forced-choice items and randomized
response methods.
Notwithstanding the potential limitations of
self-report data, the method of providing anonymous
self reports is still an essential methodological
tool for ethics research on several counts. To
begin with, ethics research addresses highly sensitive
topics. Given the moral and social opprobrium
attached to unethical business practices, as
well as the likely loss of employment when such
practices are discovered, it is highly unlikely that
any researcher will be able to definitively observe
unethical practices directly in field studies. Moreover,
while survey data limits our analysis to the