Can business ethics be taught?

People who coach organizations and executives on ethics, however, say the academic approach doesn't work. Among them is John Bruhn, a Scottsdale, Ariz. management consultant with an ethics specialty and an academic résumé that includes service as provost of Penn State University at Harrisburg.

"No one is going to come out of those courses as a different person," Mr. Bruhn says. "The thing those courses are going to do is create awareness. They're not going to change behavior because ethics is learned by modeling, not by reading a bunch of books over a weekend."

To impact behavior, Bruhn says, organizational cultures need to lead the way. Too often, executives come to learn, he says, that "it's the end product – the results – that count.... Boards of directors don't want to know the details of how you got them." A better way, in his view, is for corporation boards to set higher expectations for conduct and for executives-in-training to spend more time in mentoring relationships. He also says healthy companies affirm that taking less profit is sometimes a necessary cost of maintaining high ethical standards.

Others believe patterns of moral behavior are formed long before students reach college. The key period for shaping a person's moral character falls between the ages of 2 and 10, says Alex Pollock, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former CEO of Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago.

"If you're 22, it's too late," Mr. Pollock says. He sees today's academic centers for ethics-related research as "luxury goods ... another example of the wealth of our society." In his view, companies looking for truly ethical leaders need to study individual behavior on the job and see who can be trusted to resist the smallest temptations.

"I'm looking for someone who has a fundamentally puritanical disposition, [who is] honest, even under extreme pressure," Pollock says. "I want someone for whom not taking someone else's money or anything else isn't a decision. It's just automatic."

For executive coach and psychologist Kevin Fleming of Jackson Hole, Wyo., managers can learn ethical behavior, but not from courses that teach "what you should do." Instead, they need to embrace feedback from colleagues and advisers in order to "understand the values inside you that would determine what you would do" in a sticky situation. Today's courses are having an impact, he says, although not the one he'd like to see.

"What I see in my field is better rationalization of hiding things," Mr. Fleming says. "I think [executives] have just become brighter. We're always having to deal with the narcissistic executive brain, which has propensity for amazing talents but also for incredible illusions."

On at least one central point, academics and consultants agree: Ethical behavior at the top requires better training.

Organizational structures and cultures, they say, can effectively encourage or discourage decisionmaking that's apt to incur some measure of cost, personal or organizational, in the process of doing what's right.

Goldsmith notes that scandalous behavior among executives is almost always correlated with an organizational culture that punishes people for critiquing their superiors. And for all their efforts, Fernandes concedes, business-school programs aren't going to determine executive behavior on the job as much as incentives from an employer will.

"The governance structure is the conscience of the organization," Fernandes says. "That conscience, the board of directors, has to set the tone for the CEO [and] has to be the conscience of the chief executive when the chief executive thinks about doing something that is more short-term and risky from an integrity standpoint.... In the end, [board members] set the reward system that recognizes the CEO."

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