Best Intentions, Worst Results: Grounding Ethics Students in the Realities of Organizational Context

Abstract

tions cannot be justified purely on economic grounds. Marilyn immediately turned her insights into action. She wrote a letter to the governor, complaining about conflicts of interest among some industrial commission members he had appointed. She joined campus protests against one of her university's suppliers of athletic gear on the grounds that they had violated worker rights. Marilyn's civic activism strengthened her ethical voice, and all was going well until she began expressing that voice in her workplace. She held a part-time job at a hi-tech company planning trade shows, and when she started criticizing some company policies on ethics grounds, her boss defended them and rejected her complaints. Finally, when Marilyn thought that sales personnel were systematically lying to customers about delivery schedules, she reported the matter up the chain of command as an ethics problem. A subsequent investigation turned up insufficient evidence, and Marilyn's hours were cut back, forcing her to look for another part-time job. Marilyn had a disconf irming experience that is in one sense similar to those faced by any novice attempting to apply academic ideas in a realworld setting. Yet, there are two things that make applying ethics different from applying other business concepts. First, ethics is potentially central to the development of the self (Baumeister & Exline, 1999). In ancient times, ethics and character were inseparable. The Greeks conceived of ethical behavior as an expression of personal virtue rather than the application of principles. While this viewpoint is rarely at the center of ethics teaching today (for how that might be done, see Hartman, 2006, in this journal), it reminds us that moral development parallels the development of the self. And, while not all people define their sense of self in moral terms (Aquino & Reed, 2002), ethics is a subject that touches more raw nerves, stirs more emotions, and surfaces more strongly held opinions than any other in the business curriculum. Marilyn's business ethics course did not merely expose her to knowledge; it gave her a means of actuating her nascent moral self. So, when she took that knowledge into the workplace and experienced failure, it was a much more serious blow than if she had discovered that an action