Business Ethics Education: One Management Educators Perspective

Results from the 2005 National Business Ethics Survey (NBES) indicate that over half of employees observed at least one type of misconduct in the workplace during the past 12 months, with nearly 40% observing two or more violations (http://www.ethics.org). The President of the Ethics Resource Center, Dr. Patricia Harned, has stated that this statistic has not changed much over the past 5 years even though there is a rise in the number of companies that have implemented ethics programs (http://www.ethics.org) Business faculty has the opportunity to provide business students with ethical reasoning opportunities to meet these ethical challenges successfully. AACSB has stated in their 2004 Ethics Education in Business Schools that…business education must encourage students to develop an understanding of the challenges surrounding business ethics and provide students with the tools to recognize and respond to ethical issues, both personally and organizationally (9). This paper outlines a proposed undergraduate business ethics education model that is developed in compliance with AACSB standards