Can business ethics be taught?

Post-Enron, business schools are boosting ethics courses. But critics say book learning won't change much.

from the March 21, 2007 edition

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"What really causes behavioral change [among future business executives] are changes in curriculum and how one has an outlook of business, and that's where business schools come in," Mr. Fernandes says. "Business schools have a much greater long-term impact on the change of thinking of corporate leaders and managers than do legislation and media coverage."

Ethics education will eventually have an impact akin to that of entrepreneurial education, Fernandes says. After its inception in the early 1970s, it produced a generation of nonbureaucratic corporate leaders, he says. But consultants who focus on executive performance and ethics aren't persuaded that readings, lectures, and discussions are making much difference – or that they will in years to come.

"It's unrealistic to expect people's behavior is going to change because they sit in classes," says Marshall Goldsmith, an executive coach based in San Diego and an adjunct lecturer at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business. "Is there any proof in any executive education ... that anyone who went to any course ever changed any behavior as measured by anyone else over any period of time? Not that I know of."

Mr. Goldsmith and others concede that new emphases on ethics in business schools send a message to future managers that ethics are important, even in the corner office. But, they caution, expectations for a big impact from these programs are pie-in-the-sky thinking.

Business ethics as a course of study traces its roots to the mid-1970s, but only over the past five to 10 years has the field grown rapidly. That's according to Michael Hoffman, executive director of the Center for Business Ethics at Bentley College in Waltham, Mass., and a coauthor of the recent study. He traces its growth largely to two factors: tougher regulations and scrutiny in the press. Together, they have proliferated demand for corporate compliance departments, ethics officer positions, and ethics-savvy business-school grads.

"Higher education, especially after Enron [collapsed], realized it hadn't done enough" in ethics, sustainability, or corporate social responsibility, Mr. Hoffman says. Now "the trend is to integrate the three themes throughout the curriculum so it becomes habitual and becomes part of the thinking of a business executive."

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