Essay Behavioral Ethics and Teaching Ethical Decision Making – Management Assignment Help

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Behavioral Ethics and Teaching Ethical Decision Making∗

Minette Drumwright Department of Business, Government and Society, Red McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station A1200, Austin, TX 78712, e-mail: mdrum@mail.utexas.edu Robert Prentice † Department of Business Government and Society, Red McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station, Austin, TX 78712, e-mail: rprentice@mail.utexas.edu Cara Biasucci Red McCombs School of Business, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station, Austin, TX 78712, e-mail: cara.biasucci@mccombs.utexas.edu

ABSTRACT

Business education often renders students less likely to act ethically. An infusion of liberal learning in the form of behavioral ethics could improve this situation by prompting students to develop higher levels of professionalism that encompass ethics, social responsibility, self-critical reflection, and personal accountability. More specifically, teaching behavioral ethics, which draws upon psychology, sociology, and related fields, can improve students’ ethical decision making in a manner that can lead to a more ethical climate in organizations and in society more generally. This article introduces key concepts of behavioral ethics, argues that teaching behavioral ethics can have a positive impact, discusses materials that can be used to teach those concepts, and addresses action-research approaches to assessing the effectiveness of the instruction. There is significant evidence, though preliminary and incomplete, that teaching behavioral ethics is a promising new approach for improving the ethicality of students’ decisions and actions. Subject Areas: Ethics, Leadership, Curriculum Design, Course Design, Undergraduate Education. INTRODUCTION Three recent book-length discussions of the need to reform business school education all make the simple point (among others) that business education can be ∗The authors gratefully acknowledge Mary C. Gentile, Oguntebi Olabisi, H.W. Perry, Jr., Ben Shaw, Lynn Perry Wooten, and three anonymous reviewers for their help on earlier versions of the manuscript. †Corresponding Author. 431 432 Drumwright, Prentice, and Biasucci improved through an infusion of liberal learning, which we define as the research and teachings that may be usefully borrowed from the liberal arts and sciences. Colby, Ehrlich, Sullivan, and Dolle (2011) noted that business students see liberal arts classes that they must take to fulfill distribution requirements as largely irrelevant to their education. They recommended that liberal learning be integrated into the undergraduate business curriculum so that students may prepare to be civic leaders who more fully understand the effects that business has on society and the implications that other social institutions hold for business activity. Datar, Garvin, and Cullen (2010) suggested that MBA programs improve their teaching of thinking, reasoning, and creative problem solving by focusing less on narrow business skills and more on topics grounded in liberal learning: ethics, social responsibility, and personal accountability. Finally, Khurana (2007) urged that business schools emphasize professionalism by infusing the management profession with values beyond the technical requirements of jobs, and by teaching students that the purpose of management and corporate leadership necessarily goes beyond maximizing shareholder value and includes providing service to society. Delbanco agreed with these three assessments, lauding the infusion of literature and the arts into business school education “as a way to encourage self-critical reflection among future . . . entrepreneurs” (Delbanco, 2012, pp. 99–100). One area in which business education needs an infusion of liberal learning is that of ethical decision making. As the dean of the Harvard Business School recently noted, “[t]he public lost trust in business, and some of our graduates seem to be responsible for that” (Middleton & Light, 2011). The dean of the IESE Business School agreed that business schools “need to better integrate an ethical view of management across the curriculum” (Canals, 2010).