Ethical Reasoning Instruction in Non-Ethics Business Courses: A Non-Intrusive Approach

Abstract This article discusses four confirmatory studies designed to corroborate findings from prior developmental research which yielded statistically significant improvements in student moral reasoning when specific instructional strategies and content materials were utilized in non-ethics business courses by instructors not formally trained in business ethics. The objective of the research was to develop non-intrusive methods for instructors not trained in ethics to teach business ethics in their content courses. The measurement of moral reasoning used in all of the research studies was the revised version of the Defining Issues Test, the DIT-2 (Rest, Narvaez, Bebeau, & Thoma, 1999). Keywords: business schools, business ethics, teaching, moral development, decisionmaking model, designing a course, integrated curriculum, Defining Issues Test. Introduction This article discusses four confirmatory studies designed to corroborate findings from prior developmental research which yielded statistically significant improvements in student moral reasoning when specific instructional strategies and content materials were utilized in non-ethics business courses by instructors not formally trained in business ethics. The specific intervention strategies and instructional materials utilized in the studies to increase levels of student moral reasoning were developed through several iterations of research studies that were carried out over a four-year period at a Midwestern university. The measurement of moral reasoning used in all of the research studies is the revised version of the Defining Issues Test, the DIT-2 (Rest, Narvaez, Bebeau, & Thoma, 1999). Originally funded by a grant from the Lilly Endowment, the most recent series of studies reported in this article were funded by a generous grant from the Delta Pi Epsilon Research Foundation, Inc. Need for the Study While business schools accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) must meet ethics training expectations delineated by Assurance of Learning Standard 15: Management of Curricula ("Eligibility Procedures," 2007), AACSB does not specify any courses or program template for delivering ethics and corporate social responsibility training to students. However, AACSB does proffer the notion that business faculty - not faculty from outside the business school - should teach these concepts to undergraduate and MBA students. As stated in the AACSB study document, Ethics Education in Business Schools (AACSB International, 2004), Faculty involvement is an important indicator of the salience of issues in academic environments. Relegation of ethical issues to a small fraction of the faculty or to those perceived as having low status vitiates the power of the educational experience. Also, in an environment where concern over ethical issues has risen sharply, lack of business school faculty involvement may indicate a disconnection between the academic experience and the real world. If ethics content is taught primarily by faculty from outside the business school, questions should be raised as to what is done to convey the relevance of ethics in business practice, (p. 19) Because "business ethics" and "corporate social responsibility" are not business disciplines in the traditional sense, and because many business professors do not feel themselves sufficiently trained to teach such courses (see Bok, 1988; Klein, 1998; Norman, 2004), business schools are left to grapple with the conundrum of how to teach business ethics to all students by using a large percentage of regular business school faculty. Teaching business ethics throughout the core curriculum in delineated integrative programs has proved problematic for some business schools because the longevity of these programs is limited by faculty turnover and new faculty members' unwillingness to assume responsibility for teaching outside of their areas of specialization (Wharton School professor, Tomas W. …