The Emerging Bright Side: Positive Business Ethics Education

This study reports the findings of an investigation of MBAs and their views on the teaching of business ethics. The author found that tomorrow's business leaders believe that there are ethical standards that should be followed in business but that current ethical standards do not meet society's needs adequately. Moreover, although most respondents indicated that they can determine what constitutes ethical and unethical behavior, there was widespread agreement among students about whether business ethics should be taught as a required course in business schools.

We aim to explore the status of nurses' ethical behaviours in clinical practice and what contributes tonurses' unethical behaviours. Nurses' ethical behaviours strongly impact the nurse-patient relationship and the quality of nursing services. Therefore, we must understand the status of clinical nurses' ethical behaviours and the causes of nurses' unethical behaviours. Focus group and in-depth semistructured interviews were conducted with 21 head nurses and nine nurses, respectively. The data were analysed by content analysis. The analysis revealed seven themes: lack of awareness of the protection of patients' privacy; violation of patients' autonomy; improper communication; failure to protect the patient's best interests; lack of moral emotion; lack of psychological care for special patients; and causes of unethical behaviour. The present situation of ethical nursing behaviour is not optimistic, and there are still many unethical nursing behaviours in clinical work. There are many reasons for unethical behaviours. Efforts should be made related to nurses, patients, workload, the ethical climate and rules and regulations to improve the situation. Nursing managers can improve ethical behaviour by strengthening nurses' ethics studies, enhancing nurses' professional identity and social status, optimizing the allocation of nursing human resources, creating a good ethical climate and improving relevant rules and regulations.

[Extract] Where is business ethics today? And with this, where are business ethics today? Where do we find them? Are there enough? These questions strike us today, and present us with our starting points. First of all in considering how business ethics has evolved, and what state it is in. But also, in asking where business and ethics are today and how and where they might be in the future. Starting out with these seemingly innocent questions, we face a set of somewhat more troubling questions about the location of business ethics. For some, business ethics is quite easy to locate. When seen as a business function, an academic discipline or a part of business school education, business ethics is often taken as something that obviously has a location. If business ethics is readily locatable, then it can be disciplined, generalised, taught and instituted as part of best practice and corporate strategy. But are business ethics so easily locatable? Are they a 'something' characterised by a 'thingliness' that might allow them to be taken in hand and put to use? If business ethics are not open to such reification, then we might find that ethics in business involves a basic dislocation relating to phenomenal experiences arising when things are out of place. Business ethics would then take place when, as was sensed by Hamlet, things are 'out of joint'. The experience of whistleblowers and the victims of corporate malfeasance is certainly one of deeply felt dislocation. If we find business ethics in these practices, might ethics also be found in other spaces of dislocation?

This study explores the business ethics education literature published between 1982 and 2021. A systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis of 862 scholarly articles spanning 40 years of research on business ethics education revealed a thematic shift in the literature. Whereas older articles were predominantly concerned with ethics, relatively newer articles mainly focus on addressing the broader concept of sustainability. A content analysis of the 25 most locally cited articles between 1987 and 2012 identified two main research streams: (a) integration of business ethics into business school curricula and (b) the pedagogical approaches and tools used to teach business ethics. An additional content analysis of the 15 most locally cited articles published between 2016 and 2021 revealed that discussions related to integration and pedagogical approaches and tools were still ongoing in the literature, albeit with a focus on sustainability-related concepts such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME). Building upon our findings and existing literature, we develop a framework that we refer to as Transforming Ethics Education in Business Schools (TEEBS), which we argue may help business schools reclaim the ‘ethics’ in business ethics education.

After providing some important historical background on initiatives in teaching business ethics through a grant to the American Philosophical Association by the National Endowment for the Humanities and through a four million dollar effort by Arthur Andersen to introduce business ethics into the functional core courses of the business school curriculum, I consider 11 decisions that those teaching business ethics must face. The two most important are how to introduce traditional ethical theory into the course and how to deal with cynicism about the very concept of “business ethics.” Other issues include how to grade the course, how case oriented should the course be, how often should you use business people in the course, and how do you limit the abuse of having laptops in the class.KeywordsBusiness EthicBusiness SchoolEthical TheoryStakeholder TheoryBusiness PeopleThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This paper examines the moral reasoning trends of CEOs (chief executive officers) in the automotive industry, gauging their relations to ethical behaviors and scandals as well as analyzing the influence of scandals and other factors on their moral reasoning. For such a purpose, we carried out a moral reasoning categorization for the top 15 automotive companies in vehicle production in 2017 by applying Weber’s method to letters written by CEOs for the period 2013–2018. A positive global trend was observed, with some CEOs reaching high levels, although the evolution was uneven without clear patterns and, in the light of facts, not sufficient, at least in the short term. We also found evidence linking the moral reasoning stages with the ethical performance of companies and introduced the concept “tone ‘into’ the top”, reflecting how CEO moral reasoning can be shaped by the company and external factors. This paper stresses the importance of considering the moral tone at the top in relation to company ethical behaviors and the interest of education in business ethics. The outcome is useful for CEOs and other managers seeking to improve corporate social responsibility (CSR) and company ethical performance and to anticipate conflicts as well as to leverage for future research.

As prospective future business leaders, business student attitudes toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) is vital. Therefore, business schools and institutions have a responsibility to produce graduates who act in an ethical and socially responsible way when they practice business. Although business ethics courses are compulsorily required by both international accrediting organizations AACSB and ACBSP, the effectiveness of such courses is often questioned. This research uses survey data collected from business students of a private business university in Vietnam to provide empirical evidence on the effect of participation in business ethics classes on students’ perceptions of CSR. The results show that after joining the course, students tend to have a higher level of general CSR perception. However, when assessing the two separate factors of CSR perception (i.e., perceptions of short-term versus long-term responsibilities), the effect of business ethics education on long-term responsibility perception is not significant, while the effect on short-term responsibility perception remains significant. The findings provide recommendations for business schools, accrediting organizations, and the students themselves to review and refine teaching syllabi and methodology so that the teaching and learning of business ethics at business schools could achieve a higher impact and create more authentic and sustainable values. Keywords: CSR perception, Business ethics education, business education, ACBSP

More and more scholars are expressing their apprehensions regarding the current state of management education. The increased number of corporate scandals has fueled their concerns that training students to have sound business ethics upon graduation has failed. Consequently, research is emerging that focuses on the lack of impact that business ethics teaching has had on students in recent years. Remarkably, the voice of managers has barely been heard in this area, even though they are the ones who are among those best suited to evaluate graduates’ capabilities to solve ethical dilemmas. This research presents the managers’ view on the role of business schools in training students in business ethics, and the managers’ evaluation of business schools’ success in that area. The findings reveal that managers are quite disappointed with the lack of improvement in the ethics of graduating students. Managers nonetheless provide a range of ideas for business schools to work on, and particularly, call for closer collaboration between industry and business schools.

PurposeThis study aims to identify students’ perceptions of the importance and objectives of sustainability and business ethics education, considering contextual factors (ethics-friendly environments) and including the social desirability (SD) bias to strengthen data robustness and assess response truthfulness.Design/methodology/approachA survey was administered to 170 business students at an Icelandic university to measure their attitudes and perceptions toward sustainability and business ethics courses. Descriptive statistics, Mann–Whitney tests, χ2 tests and multivariate regression were used for the analysis.FindingsThe results show no significant differences among participants, depending on individual and organizational factors. The authors did not find significant differences in gender, age or exposure to sustainability and business ethics courses concerning social desirability bias. Contextual solid factors can explain these results.Originality/valueThis study expands on previous research by examining students’ perceptions of sustainability and business ethics education in an “ethics-friendly environment” like Iceland, a new and fertile territory for business ethics education research. These elements are crucial for further research on students’ attitudes toward sustainability and business ethics and the role of this subject in university curricula.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to first, provide an interdisciplinary overview of the pedagogical perspective known as “embodied learning”; second, describe the particular relevance of embodied perspectives for business ethics and business ethics education; third, introduce “relational sculpting” as a pertinent embodied technique in this context.Design/methodology/approach– Content analysis of qualitative data on relational sculpting fromn=50 participants in two sections of a required undergraduate course on business ethics was conducted.Findings– Findings indicated that the use of relational sculpting was associated with increased emotional awareness of, and empathy for stakeholders; a more compelling sense of connection to ethical issues and the affected stakeholders; enhanced understanding of stakeholder perspectives; and, a stronger appreciation of interconnections among stakeholders, as well as of the situation as a whole.Research limitations/implications– Future investigations could explore diverse other applications of relational sculpting and any implications these might have for learning effectiveness. Consideration could also be given to the viability, development, implementation and assessment not just of embodied techniques, but also, of integrated and coherent educationalprogramsthat are embodied in nature.Practical implications– Step-by-step practical guidelines for using relational sculpting are provided. Additionally, comprehensive ethical guidelines for the use of innovative teaching methodologies such as relational sculpting are also provided.Originality/value– Management scholars have recently advocated not only for increased ethics training in undergraduate and graduate curricula, but also for enhanced teaching and learning through the integration of diverse scholarly perspectives and innovations. This paper provides an interdisciplinary overview of the pedagogical perspective known as “embodied learning,” identifies its relevance for business ethics and business ethics education, and also introduces “relational sculpting” as a relevant embodied technique.

This study aims to reveal teachers’ views on the institutionalization of ethical and unethical behaviors in school settings. This is a phenomenological study, one of the qualitative research designs. Purposeful sampling method was used in this study. The study group consisted of 20 teachers working in schools in Istanbul. A semi-structured interview form was developed to collect data. A content analysis was conducted to analyze the contents of the interviews. Based on the findings, it can be said that there are no systematic efforts to institutionalize ethics in schools. One of the most significant results of this study was that there was a tendency to respond negatively or to not respond to ethical behaviors in schools, while there was no institutional response to unethical behaviors. Unethicality, rather than ethicality, might be expected to institutionalize in schools where teachers have difficulties for their ethical behaviors, but do not have any problems for their unethical behaviors. In such conditions, teachers predominantly make individual efforts to act ethically since they are mostly devoid of the support of a strong institutional environment encouraging ethical behaviors. Furthermore, according to the participants, there was no ethical consensus on what should be done on facing unethical behaviors. The results of this study indicated that there could be a tendency towards the institutionalization of unethicality rather than ethicality in schools. A formal structure, such as an ethical committee, which can control the application of ethical principles and codes and evaluate change requirements in this process, is required to hinder the institutionalization of unethicality in schools. Besides, there are also certain strategies that administrators and teachers can use to reverse this tendency.

This research examines the effects of internal control, compliance, management remuneration, and work ethic on auditors' ethical behavior. The study involved 46 auditors from a public accounting firm in Central Jakarta, using purposive sampling. Both quantitative and descriptive statistical methods, along with multiple linear analysis, were employed. Data was collected through a questionnaire assessing internal control, compliance, management compensation, work ethic, and auditors' ethical behavior. Findings reveal that internal control and compensation significantly influence auditors' ethical behavior. However, management compensation alone does not have a significant effect. Work ethic also has a substantial impact on ethical behavior. Collectively, internal control, compliance, management compensation, and work ethic significantly affect auditors' ethical behavior. Managerial implications include the necessity for robust internal control systems to prevent unethical conduct and designing management compensation structures that do not incentivize unethical behavior.

Duty orientation: Theoretical development and preliminary construct testing

The paper provides a conceptual analysis of multiple facets related to dynamics of bad apples in any organization-their behavior, characteristics, individual forces, organizational forces, and moderators that promote their existence and growth in regard to creating and sustaining ethical culture. It also emphasises the role of management to work efficiently considering the negative forces brought to the working space by these bad apples. More so, specific issues like ethical and unethical behavior, morality, and the environment under which the ethical behavior transforms into unethical behavior in the organization are also analyzed. Studies narrated that organizations can promote ethical environment through employee feedback, employee engagement, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), adherence to ethical code of conduct, social exclusion, sound reward, and whistle blowing policy. The paper further emphasizes the influence of moral intensity through probability of effect, proximity, social consensus, magnitude of consequences and temporal immediacy, on ethical behavior. Besides, people with personality trait of machiavellianism and self-monitoring are more likely to become/follow bad apples and have also been observed to accelerate the individual level of unethical behavior in the organization. The need for empirical study was felt taking into account the above mentioned variables to reach an objective conclusion on the proliferation and management of bad apples in any organization and promotion of ethical behavior.

The paper examines how supervisory influence and cognitive moral development influence subordinates' ethical decision-making and ethical behavior. The proposed interactive effect these major variables have on subordinates' ethical considerations are examined with respect to: (1) before an ethical dilemma occurs, (2) when faced with an ethical dilemma, (3) during the decision process, and (4) after ethical or unethical behavior has been executed. Propositions are presented and implications for research and practice are discussed.