An integrity-based approach to ethics management combines a concern for the law with an emphasis on managerial responsibility for ethical behavior. Though integrity strategies may vary in design and scope, all strive to define companies’ guiding values, aspirations, and patterns of thought and conduct. When integrated into the day-to-day operations of an organization, such strategies can help prevent damaging ethical lapses while tapping into powerful human impulses for moral thought and action. Then an ethical framework becomes no longer a burdensome (...) constraint within which companies must operate, but the governing ethos of an organization. (shrink)

The paper describes the approach by which ethics are integrated into the undergraduate curriculum at Northern Illinois University''s College of Business. Literature is reviewed to identify conceptual frameworks for, and issues associated with, the teaching of business ethics. From the review, a set of guidelines for teaching ethics is developed and proposed. The objectives and strategies implemented for teaching ethics is discussed. Foundation and follow-up coursework, measurement issues and ancillary programs are also discussed.

When business, government, and other professions fail to meet their responsibilities, it is most often not from an inadequacy of tools, techniques, and theory but from an absence of vision and a failure of leadership that saps all sense of individual or organizational purpose and responsibility. To address this concern, management education must be more than the transfer of skills. It should be a moral endeavor, a passing-on from one generation to the next of a kind of wisdom about responsible (...) moral commitment in complex contexts. Faculty at professional schools have an opportunity and a responsibility to help students connect their capacity for high achievement to a sense of purpose and a set of principles. This book is an explanation of how one business school is trying to place leadership, ethics, and corporate responsibility at the center of its mission. It is a call to rebalance the educational trilogy of values, knowledge, and skills. Can Ethics Be Taught? traces the evolution, strategy, and implementation of the pathbreaking Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Responsibility program at the Harvard Business School. It describes in detail the origins of the initiative for this program, the sophisticated research that went into the approach, timing, and appropriate interventions for working with students and faculty, as well as the design of the program strategy itself. The accomplishments of this program have been substantial; and the lessons drawn from the experience of the Harvard Business School can prove instructive to other professional schools-in such fields as management, public administration, and law-and to corporate leaders as they design and implement their own programs on leadership, ethics, and responsibility. (shrink)

Current teaching, writing and thinking in business ethics reflects (more than) a tendency to subsume business into the theoretical, idealistic and impractical objectives of philosophical ethics. Professors Primeaux and Stieber argue against this tendency. They propose the basic business model of economic efficiency as a practical and appropriate paradigm for business ethics. Understood from a behavioral perspective, economic efficiency reflects all of the ethical considerations of the academic study of philosophical ethics, but in a much more concrete and applicable manner. (...) In effect, they are proposing that any study of business ethics defines its starting point and focus of reference in terms of economic efficiency. qu]Is there a need for business ethics? Yes, of course! Can business ethics be taught? Well, yes. But ... But, what? But, how? (shrink)

An examination of ninety-nine syllabi for undergraduate courses in business ethics, collected by the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College, reveals that half the courses are offered to freshmen and sophomores. Because of the fact that these students will have minimal knowledge of the functional areas of business firms, and because these courses rely heavily on case analysis, it is likely that the students in these courses are not able to deal effectively with the material in the course. Therefore, (...) any expectation that the business ethics course will raise the students' ethical sensitivity when considering business problems or decisions is unrealistic. (shrink)

This study reports the results of a survey designed to assess the impact of education on the perceptions of ethical beliefs of students. The study examines the beliefs of students from selected colleges in an eastern university. The results indicate that beliefs which students perceive are required to succeed in the university differ among colleges. Business and economics students consistently perceive a greater need for unethical beliefs than students from other colleges.