Examining efficacy and pedagogies of ethics courses in management education

Abstract

IIM Ahmedabad has a compulsory course on Personal and Corporate Ethics taught in the second term through a lecture-based pedagogy supported by a few cases. The motivation of this study was derived from our experience of the ethics course and the questions we had about what exactly was the bjective behind having these courses and how effective these courses were in achieving those objectives. The importance of these questions in present day scenario is evident from the number of corporate frauds and scandals that have surfaced over the past few decades where the CEOs and other senior management responsible were actually MBA graduates from some of the most reputed B-schools. A case in point would be the Enron scandal where the main accused Jeffrey Skilling (CEO) was an MBA graduate from the Harvard Business School. Thus, the objective of this study was to understand if the ethics courses taught at the B-schools were effective, whether the students felt a need for such courses and reflected on the learnings from these courses when making decisions, if there was a need for a better pedagogy for these courses and if so, then what could be a better way of teaching ethics to MBA students. A literature review was done to better understand the existent research findings about these questions. Following this, a qualitative research was done by interviewing MBA graduates of multiple institutes with experience across diverse set of industries and at different stages of their career. Using the insights from these interviews, ethics faculty from different institutes were interviewed to gauge their perspective about the objective of teaching these courses and the rationale for the course structure and pedagogy that is adopted. The findings of the literature review showed that there is indeed a need for such ethics courses for society’s good and that it is possible to teach ethics to young individuals. It has also been shown that the objectives of ethics courses shouldn’t be limited to instilling a sense of moral righteousness among individuals, but rather should also focus on imparting learnings that reflect the ethical dilemmas that the students would probably face in their jobs. Rest’s four component model has been found to be an effective tool for defining objectives and structure of ethics courses. The literature points out that ethics courses can be made standalone or components of ethics can be embedded across multiple core courses in the curriculum. The existing research on ethics pedagogy is also inconclusive about the best pedagogy for such courses and the prevalent pedagogies identified were included in our interview questionnaire to ask MBA graduates and ethics faculty to gauge their views about the efficacy of each pedagogy. The interviews with MBA graduates revealed that ethics courses were largely perceived by students as namesake courses. Course structuring and implementation, like having the course in pass/fail formats or in larger group sizes, were found to affect students’ perception of the course as they acted as signals of how important the institute perceived the courses to be. A minority view was that the institutes themselves know this and yet do it as the ethics course might not be their priority either. A majority opinion was that ethics courses did little to change their moral compass. Another key insight was that the faculty’s teaching style played a critical role in the learnings students got and the retention span of those learnings. Data fudging and unethical access to competitive intelligence were found to be among the most common ethical dilemmas that MBA graduates face every day and the skills required to better handle these situations was something not covered in ethics courses now and probably was something that could only be learnt on the job. It was noticed that while graduates in their early years of career had an apologetic tone discussing these situations, the respondents at senior stages of the career had a defensive tone regarding unethical conduct, thus indicating the way corporate culture bends the ethical compass of the employees. This indicated that the problem might be more systemic, with B-schools acting as mere providers of pliable employees whom the corporations then mold into their culture. Regardless of these broader issues, for incremental improvement in the ethics pedagogy, simulation-based learning, guest lectures and role plays were majorly viewed as better alternatives to theory and case-based learning. The interactions with ethics faculty indicated that their teaching objective for the course was to sensitize students about real-life ethical dilemmas that they may encounter in the workplace, and encourage them to pause and think before making decisions when faced with an ethical dilemma. While the faculty members agreed that students have a predefined moral compass when entering B-schools and their ethical decisions at workplace are greatly affected by the ethical personality of the organizations they join after graduation, the unanimous opinion was that the ethics courses would push students to rethink their ethical stance safely in a classroom environment where multiple viewpoints could be discussed. An interesting insight that came out as a majority opinion was that most universities include these courses as a face-saving tool or to get accreditations. The lack of importance placed by institutes on these courses is a key driver of students’ perception of these courses being less important. Due to this negative effect, faculty’s style of course delivery and course pedagogy becomes critical in inducing students’ interest. But even changing pedagogies could only bring limited change in learning outcomes which would again be short-lived. In terms of experimentation with new pedagogies, need for standardization across sections and coordination among multiple course faculty were seen as major roadblocks. Lack of incentives to develop new course material, vis-à-vis publishing research output, was a reason for old cases being continued in these courses. The disparity between the shareholder-centric ideology of the core courses and the stakeholder centric approach required in ethics courses necessitates a standalone ethics course to avoid any confusion in students’ minds. There were divided opinions on the idea of making the ethics courses graded. While it was agreed that new pedagogies could be experimented which may turn-out to be more effective, they need to be designed meticulously to ensure efficacy and should promote a reflective rather than a competitive course experience.