Ethics Are Being Taught, But MBAs Cheat
The long-standing debate rages on over whether it’s fair to pin the blame for the current financial crisis on the failure of business schools “to instill a strong ethical sense in graduates.” But not in the way you might think.
Are business schools responsible? Perhaps, says Kenneth R. Lord, the associate dean of the Kania School of Management at the University of Scranton, in his BusinessWeek column. But in his experience, the accusation is overly broad and doesn’t adequately portray what is happening today. Why? The reason is simple, he says:
The fact is, concerned, ethical faculty recognized and began to address the epidemic of greed and unethical business behavior long before the media gave voice to these issues. The B-school criticism also overlooks the many thousands of ethical managers, most of whom were trained as MBAs, who are providing us with some semblance of stability and hope of recovery from the malignant choices of a smaller number of greedy, self-interested executives.
For many years, he says, responsible business schools have nurtured their students’ commitment to values by exposing them to case studies, experiential exercises and analyses of the good and bad practices prevalent in the business world. “The goal: to show students how to arrive at decisions that are socially, financially and environmentally ethical.”
So, in this view, if business schools have been teaching sound ethics for years before the financial crisis even began, why did some of the graduates behave so badly? As a Harvard Business Publishing column asserts, the questionable behavior may actually flow from the students themselves.
A study published in 2006 by the columnist, Donald McCabe, a professor at Rutgers Business School, showed that MBAs cheat more than other graduate students in the U.S. and Canada. Why? “The biggest issue is the get-it-done, damn-the-torpedoes, succeed-at-all costs mentality that many business students bring to the game,” says McCabe, referring to his and other studies on the subject. He continues:
The cheating seems to indicate that MBA students are simply emulating behaviors they think are necessary to succeed in the corporate world. In spite of some recent exceptions, most have been taught about the supremacy of the bottom line in their MBA programs. Hitting that bottom line and personal success seem to go hand in hand for many. They are merely fulfilling expectations.
The goal of many MBAs is to get the highest GPA possible, regardless of the means, McCabe says, because the students with the highest grades get the best shot at the six-figure jobs in pharmaceuticals, high tech and finance. Many realize that business success depends on pleasing the CEO, and as motivated students eye the corporate ladder, they are often more influenced by rewards than by their values. “Their ethics become even muddier,” he says.
For this reason, some academics have suggested that business schools also need to do a much better job of filtering the people they invite into their exclusive cadres, says Claudio Fernández-Aráoz in another Harvard Business Publishing column. “Unfortunately, too many business schools themselves make bad people decisions when it comes to choosing their own enrollees, with the result that a few MBAs at the top have produced great damage,” says Fernández-Aráoz. “Schools too often fail to understand that their initial selection of candidates has huge social consequences.”
For today’s generation of business students — if cheating in school is any indicator — it may be easier to justify bad behavior, suggesting that they may be more apt to commit ethical lapses, McCabe says. This is why business schools do have a responsibility to teach ethics, and some are making strides in doing so.
“I believe business education needs to look hard in the mirror and ask a version of the famous question put forth by Rabbi Hillel: ‘If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?’” he says.
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