Ethics in the public human resource management course: An integrated and case approach to decision making

Abstract

With a solid foundation in public administration since the 1980s, few could argue that ethics is not an important aspect of a public service education. Yet, in many public human resource management (HRM) or personnel courses, ethics is relegated to one class discussion. In this study, we contend that ethics is best understood when situated within the context of other approaches to public administration. In supplying this revised theoretical and fourth approach to Rosenbloom’s three approaches to public administration, we also contend that ethics, as an equally important approach, is best utilized in the public HRM course when done so consistently and frequently using decision-making cases. First, we will explain the addition of ethics as an approach for analysis and introduce a decision-making case. Next, we discuss our research findings from a survey that assessed student responses to the decision-making case from two different MPA programs.