The faculty members and staff from the School of Business met last Friday for a lunchtime round-table discussion of Giving Voice to Values: A global partnership with UNGC PRME to transform management education.
The article centers around an operational belief that at their core, most human beings have an understanding of ethical behavior stemming from their values. It suggests that teaching ethics is not a matter of teaching students right from wrong, but rather a matter of teaching students how to effectively act on the ethical values they already inherently hold.
The article therefore proposes that learning ethics can be taught as an experiential learning opportunity, giving students to opportunity to “build a kind of ‘moral muscle memory’.
It was noted that while this is not a new concept, there was considerable scope and merit in having this discussion.
Faculty members discussed the ways in which there may be a discord between law and practice in society, particularly in behaviors such as speeding. Academia, it was felt, can often be quite idealistic, in the business world however, ethical behaviors can often be framed quite differently.
Additionally it was noted that there may be a considerable challenge in reconciling values in a multicultural society like Canada. The article references several international cases and it was felt that it would be beneficial to have North American examples as well.
The discussion then ranged into a consideration of what the characteristics were of the “conscientious person”. It was noted that behaviors are emotionally driven and can often be dictated by circumstance.
Faculty member, Jim Swaffield noted that “we are emotional beings because there is survival value in that.”
Is there any way to combat the effect of emotion on ethical behaviour? Faculty discussed the concept of normalization, as suggested by the article, this is where the practice component of the training comes in. If students have practiced a scenario before, then it is less likely to trigger an emotional response and push people towards emotional decision making when they are face with an ethical issue in the business world.
It was felt that because emotional response is a shortcut, therefore it is important to teach students how to step back so instead of going with the emotional response they are able to look at things rationally.
Finally, as an alternative to formally teaching ethics, faculty discussed whether as educators their role was to teach laws and that as modeling is a strong factor in learning ethical behaviour, there was much that they could implicitly teach students through their own behaviour.