Teaching Ethics and Honesty in Business Classrooms: A Study of Changes in Student Perceptions

Keywords

business ethics, honesty, ethics education

Abstract

With recent highly publicized breaches of ethics among members of the business community (e.g., Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, Global Crossing, and Tyco), there is a need to re-examine specific strategies employed in colleges and universities to influence business students toward increased ethics and honesty. The purpose of this study was to examine whether perceptions and attitudes toward ethics and honesty could be influenced during a semester-long college business course. A survey was administered to students in six human resource management classes taught by four different faculty members. The Likert scale questionnaire utilized the 20-item Ethics Position Questionnaire (Forsyth, 1980) as well as cight original honesty items created by Madsen (2006). In addition, it included two short cases written by Denisi and Griffin (2001) which asked for qualitative student responses. The questionnaire examined four aspects of ethics in two categories: 1) honesty (i.e., plagiarism and cheating) and 2) ethics (c.g. idealism and relativism.) To measure student changes in perceptions and attitudes, the survey was administered both at the beginning and end of the semester. During the semester instructors placed particular emphasis on integrating the study of ethics into the teaching of human resource management.

Original Publication Citation

Madsen, S. R., Turnbull, O., Nielson, T. R., & Hartman, L. (2007, January). “Teaching Ethics and Honesty in Business Classrooms: A Study of Changes in Student Perceptions.”

Document Type

Peer-Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2007

Publisher

Utah Valley State College

Language

English

College

Marriott School of Business

Department

Marketing

University Standing at Time of Publication

Full Professor

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