Duties Owed in Serving Students: The Importance of Teaching Moral Reasoning and Theories of Ethical Leadership in Educating Business Students

Abstract

This article concerns the importance of teaching moral reasoning and ethical leadership to all undergraduate students and in particular makes the case that students in business especially need familiarity with these capacities and theories given the complex world in which they will find themselves. The corollary to this analysis is the claim that content on moral reasoning and ethical leadership be mandatory for all business majors and that all degrees require course material on these subjects.This past year was my first year in full-time university teaching after more than a decade of service as a senior academic administrator. Over those years, I focused my academic research primarily on issues of teaching and research integrity, ethical leadership and university governance. Of particular interest within those research themes was the role of university teachers in facilitating the broader educational goals of educating the whole person and the development of moral reasoning as part of the purpose of university education. I was, therefore, both heartened and concerned, respectively, when a number of the students in my business and professional ethics course this past year recommended that this course become mandatory for all business majors and further argued that this was important because none of their other courses examined specifically ethical issues.

A Ten-Step Model for Academic Integrity: A Positive Approach for Business Schools

“…Implicitly, all values have a heavy ethical content and are based upon how individuals frame the duties that they owe to others with whom they hold a unique relationship, to self, to a higher power, or to society (Caldwell and Hayes, 2007). The teaching of business ethics has been addressed by a variety of studies (Bean and Bernardi, 2007;Beauvais et al, 2007;Gonin, 2007;Poff, 2007), with scholars (Boyle, 2007) and practitioners (Krehmeyer, 2007) debating the most effective approach to influencing behaviors about moral conduct. Penn and Collier (1985) advocated the teaching of moral reasoning more than 20 years ago and recommended that this teaching utilized Kohlberg's moral reasoning model.…”

“…Trevino and McCabe (1994) have advocated that business ethics courses focus on moral development training, problem solving to address moral dilemmas, and education about the application of ethical and moral principles. Poff (2007) has argued that business schools have the duty to teach their students principles of moral reasoning as well as informing them about ethical theories. Satava et al (2006) urged that business ethics teaching be focused on principlebased rather than rule-based concepts.…”

Socialization of business students in ethical issues: The role of individuals’ attitude and institutional factors

“…As far as the teachers' ethical leadership refers, prior research has studied the importance of teaching ethical leadership to business students (Poff, 2007), the various educational processes to foster the ethical leadership of educators (Smith, 2014), the influence of teachers on academic cheating (Murdock, Hale, & Weber, 2001), and the role of individual faculty members with a research interest in CSR (Matten & Moon, 2004). However, as Arain, Sheikh, Hameed, and Asadullah (2017: 666) point out, "[…] ethical leadership has not been analysed in the academic context, specifically in a teacher-student relationship."…”

More than Lip Service: The Development and Implementation Plan of an Ethics Decision-Making Framework for an Integrated Undergraduate Business Curriculum

“…As such, we provide a much finer-grained picture of the development and implementation of an integrated ethics program. We believe that this paper contributes considerably to the extant literature on both academic ethics and business ethics education because, while on the one hand much has been done toward the development of the requirements of an ethics program (as in Atkinson 2008;Poff 2007;and Caldwell et al 2005) little has been said about their actual implementation, and on the other hand, business ethics curriculum recommendations (for example, Swanson and Frederick's (2005) three-part formula, Nash's (1981) twelve questions, or Callahan's (1980) five goals), with the exception of McDonald (2004), little attention has been paid to actual, functioning integrated business ethics programs at the undergraduate level. We believe that the development of our integrated business program at CWU described herein represents a sort of 'best practices' of the five schools we profiled, and therefore may be useful for implementation at other business schools seeking and/or developing an integrated ethics program.…”

“…An example would be the competing interests of employees for higher wages, lower product prices for consumers, and higher returns on investment for owners (Jackson 2006). To prepare students for these challenges, we argue along with Atkinson (2008), Poff (2007), and Caldwell et al (2005) that within the undergraduate program there lies an obligation to equip students with ethical awareness, ethical reasoning skills based on core ethical foundations and principles, and the capacity to critically respond to changing environments that contain competing interests and complex obligations to numerous stakeholders. This somewhat formal, structured approach might also avoid the danger of allowing the informalization trap resulting in a less effective integrated ethics program (Beauvais et al 2007).…”