10.1177/1052562905280839 JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION / February 2006 Lund Dean, Beggs / PROFESSORS AND ETHICS
UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS
AND TEACHING ETHICS:
CONCEPTUALIZATIONS
AND EXPECTATIONS
Kathy Lund Dean
Idaho State University
Jeri Mullins Beggs
Illinois State University
After the spectacular ethical breaches in corporate America emerged,business
school professors were singled out as having been negligent in teaching ethical
standards. This exploratory study asked business school faculty about teaching
ethics, including conceptualizations of ethics in a teaching context and opin-
ions of the extent to which teaching ethics could positively affect student
behavior. This research also identified respondents’various pedagogical ap-
proaches to teaching ethics. Major results indicate that faculty generally do
not believe they can change students’ethical behaviors and that faculty’s con-
ceptualizations of ethics do not match their classroom approaches. Discussion
and possible explanations are offered.
Keywords: ethics; pedagogy; moral behavior; student behavior
In the weeks that followed Enron’s and WorldCom’s spectacular falls,
much was made in popular press and newspaper headlines of the busi-
ness school backgrounds earned by those fallen leaders. Business school pro-
fessors were singled out as having been negligent in teaching these corporate
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Authors’ Note: This research was supported by an Idaho State University FRC grant #918. We
would also like to thank Susan Hooks for her invaluable research assistance and the anonymous
reviewers for their developmental comments. A version of this article was presented at the 2004
national meeting of the Institute of Behavioral and Applied Management, Providence, RI.
JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT EDUCATION, Vol. 30 No. 1, February 2006 15-44
DOI: 10.1177/1052562905280839
© 2006 Organizational Behavior Teaching Society