“Don't try to teach me, I got nothing to learn”: Management students' perceptions of business ethics teaching

Abstract

Interest is growing towards including business ethics in university curricula, aiming at improving ethical behaviour of future managers. Extant literature has investigated the impact of ethics education on different ethics‐related students' cognitive and/or behavioural outcomes, considering variables related to training programmes and students' demographic aspects. Accordingly, we aim at assessing students' understanding of business ethics issues, by focusing on the differences in students' perceptions depending on gender, age, work experience, and ethics courses taken. Testing our hypotheses on a sample of 307 management students at a Polish university, and controlling for social desirability bias, we obtained mixed and partially surprising results. We found significant differences in students' understanding of business ethics depending on their gender and age (female and older students showed more ethical inclinations), but not depending on having taken ethics courses—actually perceptions of such courses worsened after taking them. Besides, work experience was not a significant variable. Moreover, course exposure intensiveness (i.e., number of ethics courses completed), and time passed since completion of the latest course, did not confirm hypothesized effects on most of the dependent (sub)variables. These findings stimulate further questions and challenges for future research (e.g., around course design and methodology, and social/cultural/contextual issues).

Students' perception of corporate social responsibility: Analyzing the influence of gender, academic status, and exposure to business ethics education

“…(2018) and Tormo‐Carbó et al. (2019) also find that being female and older predisposes students to increased business ethical sensitivity. Gomes and Graça (2019) factor‐analyze students' CSR‐sensitivity and find that older students value the dimensions of ethics more.…”

“…For this reason, Tormo‐Carbó et al. (2019) also include students' work experience to reflect their levels of exposure and maturity. However, there are situations where years and experiences on campus may validate, or change, students' CSR or ethical disposition.…”

“…Second, the study contributes to students‐CSR literature by testing the effect of academic status—class or level of study—on their CSR disposition. Related variables that have been used in previous studies are age and work experience (Tormo‐Carbó, Oltra, Klimkiewicz, & Seguí‐Mas, 2019; Tormo‐Carbó, Seguí‐Mas, & Oltra, 2018). In this study, age is considered not to be very student‐related in the sense that older students may be found in lower levels of study and vice versa.…”

Students’ perception of CSR and its influence on business performance. A multiple mediation analysis

“…First, those university students who show a more positive attitude toward CSR consider that it influences business performance more strongly, which is consistent with the results obtained in previous research works such as those undertaken by Luthar and Karri (2005). Integrating ethical issues and CSR aspects into the curricula could increase the social responsibility and consequences of ethical decisions for society in the future (Tormo‐Carbó, Oltra, Klimkiewicz & Seguí‐Mas, 2019). Our results show that the managers of the future are now receiving education and that critical aspects of social responsibility are crucial.…”

The effect of formalism on unethical decision making: The mediating effect of moral disengagement and moderating effect of moral attentiveness

“…However, unethical behaviors are still prevalent in the workplace (Weber, 2015). TA B L E 4 Conditional effect of formalism on unethical decision making across different levels of perceptual moral attentiveness Tormo-Carbó, Oltra, Klimkiewicz, and Seguí-Mas (2019) found that students who do not take ethics courses perceive such courses more positively and consider them to be more helpful in solving moral issues at work than those who do take such courses. Therefore, it is suggested that business ethics practitioners pay more attention to course design, content, and implementation in organizations (Tormo-Carbó et al, 2019).…”