Abstract:
Purpose – This paper aims to examine the role personal values play in investment decision-making
processes among Ghanaian shareholders.
Design/methodology/approach – In consequence of the recent emergence of the issue of corporate
governance practices in Ghana, and the kind of the research objective of this paper, a mix of qualitative
and quantitative methods was used. These methods were used in two stages. The first stage was
qualitative, which purposively selected 20 individual shareholders to solicit their perspectives on how
personal values influence investment decisions. Their responses were used to construct the content of
this enquiry. The second stage, which was quantitative, used stratified sampling technique to select 503
individual shareholders to confirm the responses obtained from stage one of the enquiry.
Findings – The findings of the study reveal that individual shareholders in Ghana hold value
priorities and that honesty, a comfortable life and family security play a significant role in their lives and
their investment decision-making processes, and the kind of companies they choose to invest in. Also,
to Ghanaian individual shareholders, there is a clear distinction between a comfortable life and a
prosperous life in the sense that they are not incentivized more by the latter but by the former in their
investment decisions.
Practical implications – The results can inform corporate directors and managers what values are
considered in investment decisions, and that it is not purely financial. With these results, they can be
informed that while some financial values are important, it is just to live a comfortable life and not a
prosperous life. This may influence these directors and managers to have a more long-run focus and to
have more of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) focus by putting implementable measures in place
to tackle corporate responsibility issues and to take up a responsibility for their CSR feat. Also, the
results can be used for public policy in that if regulators find out that more CSR-type information is
important to investors, they might require additional CSR-type disclosures in financial statements.
Originality/value – This paper contributes to the knowledge on the stakeholder perspective of
corporate governance that individual shareholders’ personal values have influence on their investment
decisions and the choice of companies they invest in.
