Abstract
For management educators who specialize in business ethics, corporate social responsibility, or environmental sustainability issues, 2016 and 2017 have truly been, to borrow a line from Charles Dicken’s A Tale of Two Cities, “the best of times and the worst of times.” Unfortunately, the never-ending litany of ethics lapses in corporations—from Volkswagen developing illegal software to manipulate emissions data to United Airlines suffering a global public backlash when it forcibly removed a passenger from his flight—leads to an ongoing sense that it has been the worst of times. But, ironically, for management scholars and educators who are trying to understand—and teach—why business leaders and employees continue to behave in unethical ways, it may be the best of times.
Recent developments in the field of behavioral ethics, defined as “a field that seeks to understand how people actually behave when confronted with ethical dilemmas” (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011, p. 4), opens up the possibilities of teaching and studying ethics in new ways. Behavioral ethics research suggests that people are prone to predictable ethical lapses due to psychosocial and organizational influences, power differentials, and cultural practices (e.g., clan and in-group favoritism). For those who teach business ethics, a behavioral ethics perspective presents new challenges, including the need to develop students’ moral awareness, and their ability to recognize and effectively respond to both personal and organizational ethical dilemmas.
Clearly, there is an urgent need to consider how ethics curricula and pedagogies may provide more effective approaches to understanding—before, during, and after—ethical lapses in this era of cross-cultural and global business enterprises with varied forms of institutional governance and corporate values. For those who believe that the solution to all these ethical scandals is to simply institute more—or perhaps more effective—ethical education and training of students who are in management programs, here is a quick behavioral ethics thought experiment. One global banking and financial services company was recently found to open new accounts through illegal practices ranging from fraud to identity theft and the company’s board of directors later demanded that the former chief executive officer (CEO) return $28 million to the company. The same CEO was publicly excoriated by a U.S. Senator in a September 2016 congressional hearing for his “gutless leadership” (Warren, 2016).
Another global banking and financial services company was consistently praised for its corporate citizenship and social responsible business practices and, as recently as June 2016, received the Corporate Social Responsibility Leadership (CSR) award by the Financial Services Roundtable (Financial Services Roundtable, 2016). If you guessed Wells Fargo for the first company, you have guessed correctly. Of course, if you said Wells Fargo for the second example, you would also be correct. How does a company receive a national award for CSR leadership and end up just 3 months later with its CEO being asked to resign for “gutless leadership” (Warren, 2016) in a congressional hearing? While accusations of “gutless leadership” from a U.S. Senator represent news headlines, this special issue of Journal of Management Education (JME) seeks to go beyond the narrowly casted media stories and reflect more critically on the emerging nexus of behavioral ethics and management education.
Building on past scholarship on behavioral ethics including bounded ethicality (Chugh, Bazerman, & Banaji, 2005) and ethical blindness (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011) as well as the special issue of Business Ethics Quarterly (De Cremer, Mayer, & Schminke, 2010), this special issue of JME explores questions such as, What new behavioral approaches hold the most promise in helping students cope with some of the organizational structural norms that invite unethical behavior? And what pedagogical methods successfully integrate the study of business ethics with other classroom approaches (such as service learning or “flipped” classrooms)?
Given that many otherwise ethical individuals may commit unethical acts without being aware of them, how can we best teach and engage with our students to recognize and respond to ethical dilemmas and to encourage the development of moral resilience and self-reflection in our students? Since JME’s most recent ethics education special issue was in 2006, this collection of essays and articles provides an updated understanding of how ethics pedagogy choices, effectiveness, and student experiences have changed within the context of this emerging behavioral ethics paradigm.
Essays and Articles Selected for the Special Issue
We are pleased to include two invited papers from renowned scholars in the field of behavioral ethics: Eugene Soltes, from Harvard Business School, and Mary Gentile, from University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.
We invited Eugene Soltes to comment on the challenges he saw in contemporary ethics education based on the research he conducted for his book, Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White Collar Criminal (2016). In his JME essay, “Teaching Versus Living: Managerial Decision Making in the Gray,” Eugene Soltes argues that preparing students for the ethical decisions they will face in their respective careers may be among the most difficult tasks for management educators. Soltes suggests that there is an important disconnect between what we understand from management research and how we teach decision making in the classroom.
A critical challenge for management educators, according to Soltes, is to figure out how to address this disconnect between teaching and the practice of ethics in contemporary businesses and organizations. He proposes three ways to help students deal more effectively with ethical dilemmas in their post-academic professional lives: integrate ethical decision making with core discipline teaching, cultivate moral humility rather than moral confidence, and create opportunities for norm reinforcement.
First, management education has to more effectively integrate ethical decision making with core discipline teaching. Reflecting on modern management education is a challenging area for academic inquiry since many of the most important questions raise issues that are broader than the expertise of individual scholars. All areas of management have dilemmas that can be viewed differently through the prism of ethics and morality. However, if we want students to view decisions as not simply marketing, finance, or strategy decisions, but as managerial decisions involving tradeoffs and broad ethical implications, faculty leading discipline-based classes need to incorporate this perspective into their core teachings.
Second, management education has to cultivate moral humility rather than moral confidence. Management students tend to spend a lot of their time (as part of a business ethics curriculum) discussing ethical dilemmas in the classroom. However, a deeper reflection on the traditional business ethics pedagogy reveals that the tools provided by educators (e.g., case studies) are often far more useful within the context of the classroom than in actual business situations. Because the behavioral ethics literature offers numerous reasons to be wary of moral overconfidence (e.g., we are prone to act unethically when pressed by incentives), perhaps the most important role of management educators might be to help students appreciate that the most effective way to avoid making major moral errors is through continued effort, diligence, and humility.
Third, management educators need to create opportunities in their teaching for norm reinforcement throughout careers. Since a semester-long course is equivalent to just the first few days of work in terms of time spent, management educators, as well as program administrators, need to more effectively engage students later in life, both as alumni and through executive education programs. If management educators believe that their programs and classes offer students a set of principles that contribute to their future success, then we need to find more and better opportunities to convey this knowledge to students not just once in their education but throughout their careers.
In her essay, “Giving Voices to Values: A Pedagogy for Behavioral Ethics,” Mary Gentile describes the “long and somewhat conflicted relationship” management education has traditionally held with the integration of ethics and values-driven leadership into its curriculum. Using Giving Voice to Values (GVV) curriculum as a pedagogical framework, Gentile highlights some of the key challenges around pedagogy, curriculum design, and organizational concerns at the nexus of management education and behavioral ethics. Although she has never met a professor who did not want his or her students to be both competent and responsible, as well as skillful and ethical, she has met many who did not believe that it was appropriate or even possible for them to actually teach the second half of those pairings.
Some management educators would tell Gentile that they were economists or accountants or organizational theorists or social scientists, but not philosophers or ethicists (highlighting the first point Soltes makes about the importance of integrating ethical issues in the core discipline coursework), while others would argue that their syllabi were already overly crowded and that they had an ethical obligation to teach the fundamentals of their own discipline. Gentile argues that the GVV pedagogical approach was designed in part to fill this long-standing gap in management education. Rather than persuading students to be more ethical, the GVV framework starts with the premise that most of us already want to act on our values, but that we also want to feel that we have a reasonable chance of doing so effectively and successfully. Rather than focusing on ethical analysis, the GVV curricular approach focuses on ethical implementation and asks the core question, “What if I were going to act on my values? What would I say and do? How could I be most effective?”
Inspired by a self-defense course that she took many years ago, during which students would learn and practice defensive movements by engaging with a pretend attacker in a padded suit, Gentile wondered if the “specific state muscle memory” idea introduced in her class might be adapted to create a sort of “moral muscle memory.” That is, Gentile wondered, could we create a default behavior, that is a “default to voice and action,” or rather a “default to informed voice and action?” Gentile argues that GVV as a pedagogy and curriculum is essentially about developing ethical behavior and builds on the important new knowledge that behavioral ethics has contributed to the understanding of how, why, and when individuals behave in alignment (or out of alignment) with their own values. The concepts, tools, and resources in the GVV curriculum may enable our students to be more effective in finding ways to live and work in alignment with their values.
Our remaining articles in this special issue of JME address other challenges ethics instructors face when teaching the important considerations raised by behavioral ethics. Expanding on the recognition of a gap between theory and practice of teaching ethical dilemmas made by Soltes and Gentile, Evan Offstein, Ronald Dufresne, and J. Stephen Childers Jr., in their essay, “Novel Lessons on Behavioral Ethics From the United States Military Academy at West Point,” offer a fascinating counterpoint to many of the assumptions underlying ethics education in business programs. Clearly, the business of teaching ethics is important to an institution that is so strongly focused on leadership development. The emphasis at West Point has historically been on the application of punitive consequences for ethical misdeeds—a perspective that emphasizes the criticality of ethical behavior.
More recently, however, ethical education at West Point has included developmental activities that differ from more typical educational approaches in business schools. For instance, at West Point, students are faced with heightened temptations and decision points in order to develop moral muscles. In contrast, the authors suggest many academic business programs actively try to reduce temptations (such as giving multiple versions of the same exam); students are thereby forced into ethical behavior and miss the developmental opportunities framed by personal experience with moral challenges.
In his article “Teaching Behavioral Ethics: Overcoming the Key Impediments to Ethical Behavior,” Mark Schwartz provides a concise overview of impediments to ethical decision making and introduces useful pedagogical tools for teaching ethical decision making from a behavioral ethics perspective. Schwartz suggests that moral rationalizations distort the moral reasoning process, allowing one to feel comfortable with improper moral judgments, intentions, or behavior. While the awareness that one is facing an ethical dilemma represents an important component of the ethical decision-making process, it is equally important (if not more so) to be aware of ethical limitations and the subconscious decision-making process due to biases, psychological tendencies, and moral rationalizations.
Patricia Hedberg, in her article “Guiding Moral Behavior Through a Reflective Learning Practice,” thoughtfully explores the need for students to develop the ability to engage in self-reflection in order to act with integrity in complex work environments. As leaders in the classroom, instructors can play a vital role in designing opportunities for students to reflect both individually and as a larger group. Teaching with a reflective learning practice is not easy and demands a heightened focus on the social and cultural dynamics in the classroom. But the reward can be well worth the effort; through reflective learning practices, students gain personal insight and heightened moral awareness. Hedberg offers constructive suggestions for using reflective learning practices for those instructors willing to embark on the journey.
How we can prepare our students today to make ethical decisions in the future is the key question addressed in the article, “Are Students Blind to Their Ethical Blind Spots? An Exploration of Why Ethics Education Should Focus on Self-Perception Biases,” by Kathleen Tomlin, Matthew Metzger, Jill Bradley-Geist, and Tracy Gonzalez-Padron. Their study of behavioral ethics provides much insight into why people make unethical decisions and describes how management educators can encourage students to recognize their own ethical blind spots.
Tomlin and her coauthors also present a detailed roadmap for an ethics education training module that was designed specifically to encourage students to develop awareness of their personal susceptibility to biases so that they may better recognize ethical dilemmas when they occur. The proposed ethics education training module includes a team project in which students work on a consulting project with an external client and then reflect on ethical issues they encountered.
Diane Baker’s article, “Teaching Empathy and Ethical Decision Making in Business Schools,” explores the role of empathy in ethical decision making. While educators in social work and medicine have long recognized the importance of nurturing the development of empathy, few management instructors provide activities to strengthen the ability of students to empathize with others. Yet stronger empathic abilities should encourage students to recognize ethical dilemmas in a business setting where decisions are typically not influenced by emotion. Baker offers two learning activities designed to encourage the development of empathy.
Finally, service learning is thoughtfully considered in an article by Kevin O’Brien, Dennis Wittmer, and Bahman Ebrahimi, “Behavioral Ethics in Practice: Integrating Service Learning Into a Business Ethics Course.” While service learning has been a key component of management education for many years, it is less prevalent in ethics courses. O’Brien and his coauthors provide a detailed approach to integrating service learning with an existing business ethics course. Importantly, and particularly so for those educators tasked with meeting the AACSB requirements for assessment of learning, the authors also describe the assessment process used to assess the impact of students’ service learning experiences with the major themes in their course.
Future Outlook for Behavioral Ethics and Management Education
Every time there is a large business scandal, management educators are exposed to predictable critiques of “what are they teaching in business schools?” in the business press and by a skeptical public-at-large. The growing attention to the theory and business practices of behavioral ethics scholarship represents a promising trend that encourages management educators and their students to move away from a focus on ethical challenges as intellectual problems (i.e., that could be solved simply by coming up with the most convincing argument in a classroom) to addressing ethics and values-driven leadership in terms of intellectual rigor, a moral perspective, and personal skill development.
Despite the growing academic scholarship that explores how people respond to corporate incentives and difficult circumstances (e.g., the Wells Fargo employees opening bogus accounts to meet punitive sales quotas), management education, as traditionally taught, often focuses on individual character as the motivating factor that influences success or failure. We support new approaches to management education (like GVV) that help students more effectively confront the complex ethical decisions they are likely to face in their professional careers.
Furthermore, management educators will not be able to effectively address the wide range of local and global business ethical challenges by just adding an additional course in the management curriculum. Given the growing complexity of business decisions, it is likely not possible to address ethical decision making with a co-curricular add-on. However, we might be able to view more opportunities to expand our impact and engagement with students both in and outside of the classroom by reflecting more deeply on what we know and how we might best teach ethics as management educators.