How can ethics be taught in the business setting

However, research by foremost psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg found that ethics can be taught simply through instruction. So how can business leaders go about teaching ethics to employees? The fact is, ethical business practices begin with leadership and have a trickle-down effect on everyone within an organization. Take a look at some of the biggest scandals of our time, involving Enron , Washington Mutual , and Lehman Brothers —companies that all collapsed under the weight of corruption that had been sanctioned by top leaders.

The impact and influence of these actionable steps cannot be overstated. When corporate leaders internalize them, they can have a radically positive power over everything a business and its employees do. This goes to the heart of the difference between simply instructing employees to be ethical and showing them how to be ethical through modeling the behavior. It starts at the top. Behind every ethical business is values-based leadership.

Action 2: Be Courageous. Standing up in defense of your own values and scruples may be difficult in some situations. But if your values are strong enough and run deeply enough within you, what other choice do you have?

Acting in a manner that is consistent with your ethics will both define you personally and strengthen your organization in the long run. The best leaders draw on their moral courage when unpopular but necessary action is called for. Action 3: Keep Your Perspective. Yes, as a leader you may need to work within an environment of conflicting systems, values and personalities. You cannot give up or dilute one set without weakening the other. Leaders must set, maintain, and, if possible, elevate the status—moral, financial, and reputational—of the entity they are managing.

Lose that perspective, and you risk losing everything. Action 4: Develop Social Intelligence. They also can learn reasoning strategies that can be used to arrive at the best decision. With the increasing globalization of business through travel and the use of the worldwide web, more managers are finding themselves in an international environment full of ethical challenges.

Individuals need to be taught about the conduct of business in different cultures as well as about the broader organizational issues concerning whether and how to conduct business in foreign nations, and how to guide employees working in a global business environment.

To a great extent, ethical conduct is influenced and controlled by our environment in work settings, by leaders, managers, and the entire cultural context.

As a result, we believe that educational institutions and work organizations can and do have an opportunity to teach people about ethics and to guide them in an ethical direction. This chair will serve as a cornerstone for an integrated program in business ethics at both the undergraduate- and graduate-level at New Hampshire College. A course in ethics gives students an opportunity to look at some of the most important rationalizations, in order to examine them under the cold, dispassionate light of logic.

This can have several different positive effects. For instance, it can make students more comfortable talking about topics that might otherwise be too awkward to raise. An ethics course also can give students a chance to enunciate their own values in a constructive way. She may then find it easier to speak up when she observes injustice in the workplace. Such articles can have two benefits.

First, if chosen carefully they can exemplify for students what first-rate reasoning about ethics actually looks like.

In other words, good articles on ethics are effectively special-topic exemplars of advanced critical thinking skills. Students who study such first-rate reasoning in the classroom stand a better chance of being able to engage in solid ethical reasoning in the workplace.