Giving Voice to Values: A Pedagogy for Behavioral Ethics

Management education has had a long and somewhat conflicted relationship with the integration of ethics and values-driven leadership into its curriculum. Harvard’s Professor Rakesh Khurana (2010) has argued that the very origins of formal business schools grew out of a call for greater “professionalism”—which entailed a sense of public purpose—in the business arena. However, many other scholars have documented how, in pursuit of academic credibility, on the one hand, and in response to economic pressures often reflected in the rankings systems, on the other, management education strayed from that purpose (Ghoshal, 2005; Podolny, 2009). And every time, there is a large corporate scandal, business school insiders hear cries from alumni concerned about the devaluing of their “brand” and the rest of us read the predictable condemnations in the business press, wondering “What are they teaching in business schools?” In response to these critiques and demands from so many quarters, the international accrediting bodies for management education have reviewed and revised their standards and requirements around ethics, often triggering extended and bitter controversies, and they have called for more “relevance” in management research.

Stepping away from these reflections on management education as an institution and looking more closely at the curriculum itself and the role and predilections of faculty, educators run into another set of conflicts when it comes to ethics and values-driven leadership. I have never met a professor who did not want his or her students to be both competent and responsible, skillful and ethical. However, I have met many who did not believe that it was appropriate or even possible for them to actually teach the second half of those pairings. They would argue that they were economists or accountants or organizational theorists or social scientists, but not philosophers or ethicists. They would argue that their syllabi were already overly crowded and that they had an ethical obligation to teach the fundamentals of their own discipline. They would explain that they could not, honestly, tell their students that they would not encounter real world pressures to engage in unethical behaviors or that they would not pay a price for resisting those pressures. And they were not comfortable with the idea of “preaching” to their students, both because it was ineffective and because it would result in poor teaching evaluations for themselves.

Given these fairly common faculty concerns and even resistance, but in light of the concurrent pressures mentioned above to find ways to address the issues of ethics and values-driven leadership in management education, a number of approaches have surfaced. For example, for decades, the debate has raged over whether to integrate ethics across the entire business curriculum or to craft a stand-alone dedicated course—and whether it should be required or an elective. Of course, there are both conceptual and practical reasons behind the various positions.

Briefly, the “integration” stance is that ethics does not exist in isolation and if it is taught as a separate course, students will always take the lessons they learn in their finance, accounting, marketing, or general management classes more seriously, and that sometimes those lessons will seem to conflict directly with the ethics conversations. That is, these stand-alone courses will serve as a sort of “time-out for ethics” that will never be seen as realistic or actionable. And furthermore, if the class is an elective, many fewer students are likely to take it, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that they expect company recruiters would rather see one more finance course on their transcript than an ethics class.

On the other hand, the “stand-alone course” faction argue that ethics will never get sufficient, in-depth attention if it is simply an “add on” in every other course. They will argue that the professors in those other business classes have neither the expertise nor the comfort with the material to do it justice. And coincidentally, the faculty in those other courses will often agree with the ethics professors on this point. However, in an increasingly crowded curriculum where efforts to shrink the amount of required class time is an economic reality, carving out space for a new—and more controversial—course is often a political nonstarter.

In response to all these hurdles to building ethics and values-driven leadership into the management curriculum, a number of strategies emerged. In response to faculty discomfort at the idea of integrating ethics into their syllabi, and despite the crowded curriculum, one approach was to engage faculty of philosophy and applied ethics to teach a stand-alone course. On the other hand, in institutions where an attempt to integrate ethics across the curriculum was adapted, faculty discomfort was typically addressed with a focus on case method teaching, where faculty were not required to “preach” or even valorize one position over another, but rather facilitate a sort of debate.

Both of these approaches—philosophical analysis and case method debate—presented ethical issues as cognitive or intellectual problems. That is, the focus was on so-called “ethical dilemmas” where the “right thing” to do was often unclear. The argument would be made that so-called “black and white” or clear-cut ethical questions were less interesting and even less problematic. The real challenge would come when students and managers confronted issues of right versus right, or situations where there seemed to be no ethical answer. It is easy to see why this dilemma focus would be appealing. It took the discussion out of the realm of character and morality and into the realm of intellectual debate where faculty were often more comfortable. However, increasingly it became clear to many faculty who led this sort of discussion that presenting business ethics in this fashion had some drawbacks. It suggested that any answer might be as good as any other, provided a convincing argument was made for it. And ironically, it provided students with the opportunity to build their skills in defending any answer as well. Unintentionally, this approach provided practice in rationalizing.

The growing attention to scholarship in the realms of behavioral ethics (and behavioral economics, behavioral finance, etc.) seemed to begin to provide a potential response to this problem. That is, the work being done in these fields promised to allow educators and their students to move away from a focus on ethical challenges as primarily intellectual problems that could be solved simply by coming up with the most convincing argument (or rationalization) for one choice or another. Instead, behavioral ethics focused attention on how individuals actually behaved in the face of clearly “wrong” choices. And since this scholarship was based on empirical research, it helped address some of the faculty discomforts around the idea of “teaching morality” or “preaching.” It offered clues to the organizational and cultural norms and practices that might encourage or discourage ethical choices, allowing faculty to link this material to managerial practices such as designing incentive structures, building teams, performance management, and so on. Finally, the frequently surprising or even counterintuitive lessons of this behavioral research, made it fun and interesting for faculty to share in class discussions. It did not feel “dry” or moralistic, as both students and faculty sometimes feared an ethics discussion might be.

Thus, the lessons of behavioral ethics clearly seem to begin to move management educators forward in the effort to address ethics and values-driven leadership in a fashion that has both intellectual rigor and integrity, without preaching, but also without abdicating any sort of moral perspective and commitment. Faculty can lead students in a substantive discussion, with research underpinnings, without suggesting that any answer is as ethical as any other. This is a major advance.

However, with this advance came a new set of challenges. Of course it seemed useful and even important to teach what is being learned about decision-making biases and heuristics; about post hoc justifications for more instinctive, emotional ethical choices; and about personality traits that favor (or not) values-driven action. ¹ But too often, these lessons were shared as a sort of intellectual “cautionary tale”: For example, people are vulnerable to “groupthink” so you better watch out! What’s more, readers know from the research that this sort of warning approach is not that effective. It makes individuals more aware of the tendency (e.g., groupthink, false consensus bias, overoptimism, discounting the future, etc.) when others fall prey to it, but it does not necessarily prevent our own vulnerability and tendency to do likewise (Bazerman, Loewenstein, & Moore, 2002). And perhaps more problematic, too often, this sort of research can serve to reinforce a sense of inevitability and sense of futility; that is, students can draw the conclusion that this is just how people are so there is little one can do about it.

If an earlier approach to business ethics education focused exclusively or at least primarily on ethics as intellectual puzzles and debates that too often led to a sort of “schooling for sophistry” where students learned to rationalize anything convincingly, and if the more recent and invaluable advances of behavioral ethics research raised its own challenges around the futility of cautionary tales and the risk of reinforcing a sense of unethical inevitability, then there was a need for something that built on and went beyond these foundations. And the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) ² pedagogical approach was designed in response to that need.

GVV is an innovative approach to values-driven leadership development in business education and the workplace. Drawing on actual experience and scholarship, GVV fills a long-standing critical gap in the development of values-centered leaders. GVV is not about persuading people to be more ethical. Rather, GVV starts from the premise that most of us (not everyone) already want to act on our values, but that they also want to feel that they have a reasonable chance of doing so effectively and successfully. This pedagogy and curriculum are about raising those odds. Rather than a focus on ethical analysis, the GVV curriculum focuses on ethical implementation and asks the question: “What if I were going to act on my values? What would I say and do? How could I be most effective?”

Previous approaches to business ethics education tended to do two things. First, they focused on building awareness of the many ways values will come into play in business careers, by exposing students to a variety of case examples. Second, they focused on preparing students for the rigorous and consistent analysis of such situations, using models of ethical reasoning drawn from philosophy (Utilitarianism, Deontology, Virtue-Based Ethics). The integration of Behavioral Ethics into this process, extended both of these approaches. Students became more aware of the psychological, emotional, and cognitive patterns that they themselves and others were likely to experience; and they had the opportunity to analyze the impact of these patterns on their own and others’ choices. And although Awareness and Analysis are crucially important, they both have limitations.

When it comes to awareness, although it is true that business realities such as globalization and rapid advances in technology, as well as the sometimes counterintuitive insights from behavioral ethics research, raise new values conflicts that students may not be familiar with or even recognize without attention being drawn to them, it is also true that many of the most glaring business scandals of our time are instances were many individuals did, in fact, recognize the problems and even were uncomfortable with them, but did not feel that they had any choice but to remain silent and go along. So, building awareness is necessary but not sufficient.

Similarly, although it is crucial for managers to be skilled in analysis of values conflicts, as mentioned above, treating ethical challenges as primarily cognitive puzzles can result in an unintentional emphasis on learning to justify any position, using the language of ethics. So again, although necessary, a focus on analysis is not sufficient.

GVV focuses on the third “A” and adds Action to the prior emphasis on Awareness and Analysis. The idea behind GVV is based on the observation, from both research as well as experience, that rehearsal or practice can be an effective way to influence behavior. Research on habit formation, on brain plasticity and the creation of neural pathways, and on “positive deviance” have all suggested that action, rehearsal can be impactful (Damasio, 2003; Duhigg, 2012; Pasquale, Sternin, & Sternin, 2010). But one of the ways I like to encapsulate the idea behind GVV is with a personal story and an observation from the field of kinesthethics.

Many years ago, I decided I wanted to take a course in self-defense. There were many such courses in my area and they all took pretty much the same approach; they would teach the physical moves (e.g., fist to bridge of nose, heel to instep, knee to groin) and they would ask students to practice these moves in the air. The idea was, now that class participants know the actions to take, they are prepared for any dangerous situation. However, the course I took was different; it was called “Model Mugging” and it was based on a developmental approach. That is, we students would still learn and practice the defensive movements, but once we knew them, an individual in a padded suit would enter the room. We would all take turns being attacked by him and we would have the opportunity to rehearse or practice the moves we had learned on a real human being who was protected from harm. The idea behind this pedagogy, as explained to us, was the concept of “specific state muscle memory.” That is, if we practice something in the same physical, cognitive, and emotional state that we will be in when we need to use it, even if we freeze at the moment of attack, our bodies will remember the moves. This is clearly the idea behind the repetition and practice of athletes and musicians. So, I began to wonder, could we create a sort of “moral muscle memory”? Could we create a default behavior, that is a “default to voice and action,” or rather a “default to informed voice and action”?

The combined impact of these various strands of research, this “aha” moment in a self-defense class, and my many years of experience watching students literally rehearse the rationalizations for inaction in the face of ethical breaches or even rehearse defenses for unethical actions, led to the GVV reframe. It was clear that GVV required a new pedagogical technology and while the case method is an excellent approach for teaching awareness and analysis, it was not necessarily the approach to teach action or implementation. So, GVV created a new sort of case, described by Carolyn Woo, former Dean of Notre Dame University’s Mendoza School of Business, as “postdecision making.” That is, while most cases conclude with the question “what is the best approach, the ‘right thing’ to do in a particular situation?” a GVV case ends with a protagonist who has already decided what he or she believes is the right thing to do and the questions become: “How can they get it done? What should they say? To whom? In what sequence? And what will the objections or the ‘push back’ be, and then what will they say? And what data do they need to gather? How would they frame this situation so as to make it easier to move the relevant parties to a different position? And so on.”

By making this simple change—this “reframe”—GVV attempts to help address the various challenges of business ethics education enumerated earlier. Recalling the concerns and objections that faculty often voice to the integration of ethics across the business curriculum, GVV does not require nonphilosophers to teach philosophy or to preach. The case protagonist has already chosen a course of action and the focus is on implementation. In a crowded curriculum, the GVV cases invite students to use the language, the analytics, the frameworks of the relevant discipline (not of ethics) to craft an action plan and “scripts” to influence a case’s outcome. For example, if a manager is being pressured to engage in earnings management or so-called “cooking the books,” he or she is not going to try to influence the relevant parties by quoting John Rawls or Kant, but rather, they will want to use the language of accounting and the organizational lessons of management to influence the outcomes. In this way, students are building facility with the discipline at hand even while they rehearse ethical action and voice.

In response to yet another of the challenges of integrating ethics into a management education, the GVV curriculum is intentionally flexible. ³ Faculty can use some of the many existing (and usually free) cases or if time does not permit the insertion of new material, they can insert a GVV-style discussion pasture (i.e., after analyzing a particular situation, discussing “how”—not “whether”—to get the right thing done in the face of countervailing pressures) into their teaching plans for the preexisting cases in their courses. Or, they can assign GVV exercises as team projects or as written assignments. In addition, GVV assignments are easier to assess and grade than traditional “ethical dilemma” case analyses because the professor is not trying to “evaluate a student’s ethics” but rather to assess the feasibility and rigor of the action plan and scripts the student develops (Ingols, 2011).

Perhaps most critically, in addition to addressing faculty concerns about teaching business ethics, the GVV focus on Action helps provide students with the competence and the confidence, born of skill-building, prescripting, peer coaching, and rehearsal, to actually enact their values. In addition to the various strands of research and experience that provided the insights needed to develop GVV, the curriculum has begun to be used in enough different contexts and over enough time—over 950 pilots ⁴ on all seven continents in business schools, global companies, law schools, nursing and medical settings, NGOs, the military, the police, and so on—to begin to spawn research on its impact. In addition to some work currently under review, faculty members in accounting and legal education have published on the significant positive impacts of this approach (Christensen, Cote, & Kamm Latham, 2016; Holmes, 2015). Rehearsing values-driven behaviors, rather than simply debating what they might be, appears to be having an impact.

Obviously, the GVV pedagogy and curriculum is consistent with a behavioral ethics approach as it invites students to consider when and why they, and their peers, act on their values (or not) and to consider the factors that enable or disable them from doing so. In particular, although GVV uses the insights from behavioral observation and research, it attempts to avoid the “cautionary tale” problem mentioned above. Rather than introducing students to the important lessons about behavioral tendencies and decision-making biases as mere “warnings,” the GVV approach shares these behavioral insights and then tries to enable students to use these ideas affirmatively. In a GVV discussion of decision-making biases, for instance, the argument is made that these tendencies developed for evolutionarily relevant reasons. If you are trying to escape a saber tooth tiger, for example, it is unlikely that you will be wanting to think long term. Thus “discounting the future”—although a problematic tendency in many circumstances—has been a life-saving tendency in others. Rather than simply exhorting students to avoid this tendency or pretending that it is easy to “manage it away,” GVV will acknowledge that the bias to the short-term exists; that it can be relevant in many but not all contexts; that awareness of it is useful; but that importantly, we can also name the tendency itself (which can serve to limit and potentially diminish its impact in the moment) and then actually use it in our efforts to enact our values.

For example, when students are preparing their “scripts and action plans” for voicing a values-based position in a case, instead of simply arguing against an unethical position by warning about possible long-term negative consequences, the GVV approach invites students to consider a script that, while including an explanation of potential long-term costs, also identifies potential short-term costs of unethical action as well as the short-term benefits of a more positive course of action. For example, in one of the GVV cases, a senior financial executive is pressured by his superior to distort the firm’s quarterly report. The case protagonist avoids the unethical choice by considering the immediate and daily (short-term) discomfort he would encounter in continuing to work with a senior colleague who would then believe that the financial executive is ethically malleable because he caved in to this pressure “this one time.” The case protagonist decides the result of an unethical choice now is not only possibly costly in the long run but will also be so on an ongoing and near term basis. ⁵

Thus, rather than presenting research insights into behavioral ethics as mere “cautionary tales” or contributions to a sense of futility when it comes to ethical action, GVV values and uses these insights as potential levers and tools for influencing positive behavior. For another example, Amy Edmondson (2003) has observed that

Much research on speaking up has focused on extra-role behavior, studying when people are willing to speak up about aspects of the organization or work context that go beyond the demands of their jobs. . . . Yet how people view their roles affects what is seen as discretionary behavior. (Italics added)

One might look at this observation and conclude that this is an explanation for why individuals do not or will not act on values conflicts because they believe such actions are “above their pay grade,” for example. Or one might look at this same observation and focus on the italicized phrase above, using this insight as a sort of guidebook for how one might enable employees to enact their values; that is, focus on defining their roles in ways that encompass attention to the overall health and ethics of the unit.

GVV is based on the idea of the “GVV Thought Experiment”; that is, rather than asking students “What would you do in a particular values conflict?” GVV asks “What if you were this case protagonist who knows what he or she thinks is right and wants to act on it? How would you get this done, effectively?” This shift is critical. I have found that if one asks “What would you do?” a sort of preemptive rationalization process is activated. Before a student even begins to consider how they might act ethically, they experience the countervailing arguments: maybe I do not have all the information; maybe it is not really wrong; maybe it is wrong, but it is not my responsibility; maybe it is wrong, but it is not possible to change the situation and I may even make things worse; and so on. Now of course, many of these arguments may be true or frequently true. But the impact of asking “What would you do?” activates them, often preventing a creative and open exploration of whether there may actually be an effective strategy for acting ethically. This unconscious process of preemptive rationalization frees the student from the discomfort of a sort of cognitive dissonance that would come along with knowing something was wrong but doing it anyway. It is self-protective and entirely understandable. So, rather than exhorting students to simply override a natural tendency, GVV asks them to engage in the thought experiment. GVV never asks them to consider what they would do until after they have spent time thinking about how the protagonist could be effective, thereby enabling them to experience themselves as actually having a true and viable choice, rather than being required to martyr themselves to an ethical position.

GVV, as a pedagogy and curriculum, is at its heart all about ethical behavior. It grows out of and utilizes the important new knowledge that behavioral ethics has contributed to the understanding of how and why and when individuals behave in alignment with, or out of alignment with, ethical standards and their own values. And it takes these insights beyond the realm of observation or even warning and transforms them into guiding concepts, levers and tools to enable individuals to be more effective, more often, in finding ways to live and work in alignment with their values.