Abstract
Preparing students for the consequential ethical decisions that they will face in their careers is among the most difficult tasks of management education. I describe some of these challenges based on my book Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of the White-Collar Criminal and recent work in behavioral ethics. I explore why some decisions are much more easily resolved in the classroom than in practice and offer three ways to more effectively prepare students: integrating ethical decision making with core-discipline teaching, cultivating moral humility rather than moral confidence, and creating opportunities for norm reinforcement.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Ariely
D.
(2012 ). The (honest) truth about dishonesty . New York, NY : HarperCollins .
2.
Bazerman
M. H.
(2014 ). The power of noticing: What the best leaders see . New York, NY : Simon & Schuster .
3.
Bazerman
M. H.
Sezer
O.
(2016 ). Bounded awareness: Implications for ethical decision making . Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes , 136 , 95 -105 .
4.
Bazerman
M. H.
Tenbrunsel
A. E.
(2011 ). Blind spots: Why we fail to do what’s right and what to do about it . Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .
5.
Gino
F.
(2013 ). Sidetracked: Why our decisions get derailed, and how we can stick to the plan . Boston, MA : Harvard Business Review Press .
6.
Greene
J. D.
(2013 ). Moral tribes . New York, NY : Penguin Press .
7.
Haidt
J.
(2001 ). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment . Psychological Review , 108 , 814 -834 .
8.
Jones
T. M.
(1991 ). Ethical decision making by individuals in organizations: An issue-contingent model . Academy of Management Review , 16 , 366 -395 .
9.
Milgram
S.
(1963 ). Behavioral study of obedience . Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67 , 371 -378 .
10.
O’Hara
M.
(2016 ). Something for nothing: Arbitrage and ethics on wall street . New York, NY : W. W. Norton .
11.
Pfeffer
J.
(2015 ). Leadership BS . New York, NY : HarperCollins .
12.
Ross
L.
Nisbett
R. E.
(1991 ). The person and the situation: Perspectives of social psychology . Philadelphia, PA : Temple University Press .
13.
Soltes
E.
(2016 ). Why they do it . New York, NY : PublicAffairs .
14.
Soltes
E.
(2017 , January 11 ). Why it’s so hard to train someone to make an ethical decision . Harvard Business Review . Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2017/01/why-its-so-hard-to-train-someone-to-make-an-ethical-decision
15.
Zimbardo
P.
(2007 ). The Lucifer effect . New York, NY : Random House .
16.
Zingales
L.
(2015 ). Presidential address: Does finance benefit society? Journal of Finance , 70 , 1327 -1363 .