The Extent of Employees' Compliance with Professional Ethics at the Social Security Office in Derna City: A Field Study

Abstract

This study aimed to examine the extent to which employees at the Social Security Office in Derna City comply with professional ethics through four main dimensions: compliance with laws, regulations, and instructions; time management and occupational discipline; honesty and confidentiality; and responsibility and organizational commitment. The study adopted a descriptive-analytical approach. A questionnaire consisting of 26 items was administered to a sample of 35 employees from a total study population of 118 employees. The data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) through frequencies, percentages, arithmetic means, and standard deviations, in addition to a one-sample t-test to examine the significance of the difference between the respondents' mean scores and the neutral value of the five-point Likert scale (3). The findings revealed that the overall arithmetic mean of employees' compliance with professional ethics was 3.76 out of 5, which falls within the "high" category according to the five-point classification criterion adopted in the study. The dimension of compliance with laws, regulations, and instructions ranked first, with a mean of 3.87, followed by responsibility and organizational commitment (M = 3.81), then time management and occupational discipline (M = 3.78), while honesty and confidentiality ranked last (M = 3.64). The one-sample t-test also indicated statistically significant differences between the means of most items and the neutral value in favor of the positive direction, except for three items related to safeguarding and using workplace property and self-accountability, for which the differences were not statistically significant at the 0.05 level. The study did not include independent measures of institutional integrity or public service quality; rather, it was limited to describing the level of employees' compliance with professional ethics itself. Accordingly, the study recommended a number of procedural measures directly related to its findings, in addition to suggesting future studies that examine the relationship between professional ethics and dependent variables, such as service quality and institutional integrity, using independent measurement scales for each variable.