Ethical judgement and intent in business school students: the role of the psyche?
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Ethical judgement and intent in business school students: the role of the psyche? Elaine Conway 1 & Yasuhiro Kotera 2 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The aim of this paper is to highlight how business schools can improve the ethical behaviour of future managers. It assesses the positions of ethical judgement and ethical intent within a sample of UK business students, together with an analysis of underlying explanatory factors to those positions, such as levels of depression, anxiety, stress, motivation and self-compassion. A range of scales were used to evaluate the ethical stance and psychological characteristics of a group of UK business students. The results indicate that feelings of selfcompassion, a sense of self-direction and mental health (in particular, depression) affect the ethical judgement and intent of students in a range of business and university scenarios. It is recommended that in addition to more formal ethics education, universities consider the mental health and psyche of their students to improve the efficacy of ethical training. Keywords Ethics . Business students . Mental health . Self-compassion . Motivation
Introduction Ethical issues in management and corporate scandals driven by unethical behaviour are never far away from the news headlines around the world. In the short term, such behaviour may increase profits and hence be seen as attractive financially. However, in the long run, firms with poor ethics tend to demonstrate weaker performance due to poor reputation (van Prooijen and Ellemers 2015) and increased business costs associated with lower productivity
* Elaine Conway [email protected]
1
Derby Business School, University of Derby, Kedleston Road, Derby DE22 1GB, UK
2
University of Derby Online Learning, Department of Psychology, Enterprise Centre, University of Derby, Derby DE1 3LD, UK
Conway E., Kotera Y.
and morale, such as higher staff, customer and supplier turnover (Crane and Matten 2016). It can also cause inefficient allocation of financial resources in economic markets (Fritzche 2005) and undermine share price (Cormier and Magnan 2017; Dean et al. 2010). As a manager, navigating the modern, complex and competitive business world is undoubtedly challenging, with the expectation to deliver ever-improving results to shareholders yet having responsibilities to stakeholders outside the organisation, all whilst under increasing public scrutiny. This environment of constant pressure on managers to attend to the rising expectations of stakeholders can cause levels of stress to increase, standards of judgement to fall and unethical behaviour and practices to develop (Blodgett et al. 2001; Cohen et al. 2001). When facing issues where ethical judgement is required, where the interests of an individual or group are in conflict with the interests of another, this increasing pressure can cause managers to take decisions which are in conflict with expected norms and ethical behaviour for political reasons or in order to increase profits (Haski-Leventhal et al. 2017). Indeed, f
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