Despite the growing body of literature on training in the responsible conduct of research, few studies have examined the effectiveness of delivery formats used in ethics courses. The present effort sought to address this gap in the literature through a meta-analytic review of 66 empirical studies, representing 106 ethics courses and 10,069 participants. The frequency and effectiveness of 67 instructional and process-based content areas were also assessed for each delivery format. Process-based contents were best delivered face-to-face, whereas contents delivered online (...) were most effective when restricted to compliance-based instructional contents. Overall, hybrid courses were found to be most effective, suggesting that ethics courses are best delivered using a blend of formats and content areas. Implications and recommendations for future development of ethics education courses in the sciences are discussed. (shrink)

Reoccurring instances of unethical employee behavior raises the question of the effectiveness of organization’s employee ethics training programs. This research seeks to examine employee ethics training programs among US-based global organizations by asking members of the Ethics and Compliance Officer Association to describe various elements of their organizations’ ethics training programs. This investigation and assessment reveal that there are some effective aspects of ethics training but five serious concerns are identified and discussed as potential contributions to the lack of ethics (...) among business organizations’ employees. (shrink)

The number of online courses in business schools is growing dramatically, but little has been published about teaching business ethics courses online. This article addresses key pedagogical design, delivery, student engagement, and assessment issues that should be considered when creating a high-quality, asynchronous online business ethics course for either undergraduate or graduate business student populations. Best practices are discussed within an integrative case study approach based on the experiences of a director of online faculty development and two accomplished online business (...) ethics instructors, one teaching at a small college and the other at a research-oriented university—their successes, learning opportunities, and recommendations. (shrink)

Whereas a range of business and management scholars have argued that business is in an ethical crisis, Nietzsche makes it possible to see that it is ethics itself that is in crisis, and that only as the crisis in ethics is dealt with can ethics in specific areas such as business be addressed. Nihilism is the name that Nietzsche gives to the crisis in ethics. The failure to fully appreciate nihilism and its pervasiveness as the root cause of the problem, (...) as evident in the perpetual quest to obliterate nihilism through the creation of ethical frameworks and foundations, has plunged business and ethics scholarship in the field, ever deeper in the quagmire of nihilism. In response to nihilism, Nietzsche offers a re‐evaluation of all values. To re‐evaluate all values means to accept nihilism and see it as a basis for questioning taken for granted assumptions that have supported the notion of ethics or values in order to re‐imagine an ethics which is responsive to the crisis of nihilism. The paper thus proposes that rather than trying to invent new ethics or ethical foundations, or figuring out “how” to be ethical, we need to turn our attention on the “why to be” of ethics. (shrink)

Ethics courses are most commonly evaluated using reaction measures. However, little is known about the specific types of reaction data being collected and how these reaction data relate to improvements in trainee performance. Using a sample of 381 ethics training sessions, major reaction data categories were identified. Content and course satisfaction were the most frequently collected types of reaction criteria. Furthermore, content relevance and course satisfaction showed strong, positive relationships with performance criteria, whereas content satisfaction demonstrated a moderate, negative relationship. (...) These results and future directions for ethics training evaluation are discussed. (shrink)