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Moving Forward on Ethics Education in One School’s MBA Program
David E. Olson
Chester Bryniarski
Cuiping Wang
Silver Arias
California State University – Bakersfield
9001 Stockdale Hwy
Bakersfield CA USA 93311
661-654-2284 or 805-646-1596
dolson@csub.edu,
cbryniarski@bak.rr.com, cuipingwang2008@yahoo.com, ksilverarias@yahoo.com
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Moving Forward on Ethics Education in One School’s MBA Program
ABSTRACT
Recent events in the financial industry, the BP oil spill, and HP point out the clear and
present need to address business ethics within MBA programs. It remains, however, a
marginalized discipline. In this work, we take a brief look at business ethics education in U.S.
MBA programs and follow one program as it attempts to address the need to review and expand
business ethics in their curriculum. In a survey given in the capstone course, it was found that
most students want business ethics to be part of the curriculum. While most feel that ethics
should be an integral part of the capstone course (and, perhaps other courses as well),
approximately half also feel that a stand-alone course should be a requirement of the program.
When looking at how business ethics should be taught, most feel that a variety of methods
should be used but the order of preference was discussion, lecture, and lab or field study. While
this is just a preliminary study that has a small sample size and only obtains feedback from
students, it provides clear support for inclusion of business ethics into an MBA curriculum.
INTRODUCTION
The discipline of ethics is both vital and one of the oldest fields of study. However, in
our modern academy, it is often simply ignored or relegated to an afterthought. Its importance,
as well as its low priority, is nowhere more true than in business education. With a growing
focus on science, MBA programs are often slow to find the need to train their students in the way
of right and wrong, (Porter and McKibbin, 1988). This paper takes a look at one such school
that is currently working to make business ethics an integral part of its curriculum.
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LITERATURE REVIEW
The quest for business ethics spans centuries and civilizations. In early Western
civilization its beginnings grew out of the concept of arête, which could be translated to mean
excellence. In the East, the Mongols were guided by three tasks to perform in life—to ride well,
shoot straight, and speak the truth (600 BCE). By 350BCE, Aristotle was teaching prescriptions
about how commerce, wealth accumulation, and money should be conducted and treated. He
writes that, “the trade of the petty usurer is hated,”. Ever since, religious leaders, philosophers,
and politicians from Luther and Calvin to Adam Smith and Karl Marx and from Machiavelli to
Obama have all had much to say about how business ethics should and should not be conducted
and promulgated. Most often, these stories tell of woeful deficiencies that harm customers,
employees, shareholders, the environment, or any number of negatively-affected parties.
Marking its continued interest, a cursory look at the current best-selling books will find
everything from insights on current evil behavior in titles such as, The Big Short: Inside the
Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis, which is about how behavior on Wall Street led to the
recent economic collapse, to others that show how companies can do well by doing good such as
Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s recent work, SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation,
Profits, Growth, and Social Good. All this is, of course, for good reason. There is a never
ending interest in examples where businesses and their leaders rise or fall as they deviate from
ethical expectations. There will be, then, a never ending sequence of stories where businesses
and their leaders do so.
Recently, it seems as though the trend is more focused on the negative deviations. A
survey done by Pomeroy (2007) about American employees found that 73% have witnessed
ethical misconduct at work. Unethical behavior by employees may include things such as
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wasting company/working time, using company supplies for personal use, property theft, failing
to whistle blow, illegitimately exchanging company resources for personal gain, and deceiving
customers or clients (Luna-Arocas and Tang, 2004). Business ethics has become an increasingly
important part of the global conscience (Freyne, 2009; Gilmartin, 2008). Businesses quickly
recognized that damage can be done by unethical behavior. We have all experienced the recent
collapses in the economy, and we have all read about how various parties have been at fault. In a
survey taken in January 2009 by the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, it was found
that 76% of respondents had lowered their level of trust in the senior management of U.S.
corporations just since June 2008. It is noteworthy that this survey took place before the oil spill
debacle with British Petroleum or Mark Hurd’s recent allegations of expense report
manipulations at Hewlett-Packard.
So, it should come as no surprise that, “leading businesses no longer debate the
legitimacy of the role and importance of ethics, rather, they are forging ahead, finding new ways
to put ethics into practice” (Krehmeyer, 2007). Some businesses even state that sustainable
success can be achieved only through ethical behavior (Veiga, 2004).
Ethics in Business Schools
In response, Swanson and Frederick (2003) believed business ethics should be an
essential part of the curriculum of schools of business. Every year, American companies hire
employees from schools of business. If these graduates bear unethical minds, American business
and society will suffer eventually. Business schools should have the responsibility to prepare
business students with ethical challenges, and equip them with tools so that they can combat with
ethical armament in the business world.
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Research has shown that one way to establish an ethical climate and to reduce unethical
employee behavior is through ethics training or corporate ethics programs (Greenberg, 2002,
Tang and Chen, 2008). Ethics training can be integrated with education. Wright says that,
“Education is the best means to develop good ethical behavior in the modern business
environment” (1995). Giacalone (2008) suggests that business schools need to ensure that
students are equipped with ethical integrity to meet challenges in the real business world.
Business ethics in academia has followed a mixed path. Around fifty years ago, separate
studies by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation concluded that the quality of
business schools must be improved through an increased focus on hard sciences like economics,
statistics and research. At a time when many business schools were still struggling for
legitimacy, this position was taken to heart. So, while subjective disciplines such as ethics have
remained as important as ever to the world, they continually struggle for respect and for
important resources. (Podolny, 2006).
As a formal discipline, business ethics can be traced to its first academic conference
which was held at the University of Kansas in 1974 (N. Bowie, 1986). In the academic world,
we have come a long way from that first conference 36 years ago. There are now several
journals that devote themselves entirely to the study of business ethics. These include Journal of
Business Ethics, The Journal of Academic and Business Ethics, and Business Ethics Quarterly.
Other mainstream journals feature articles and even entire issues to the subject. One such issue,
Academy of Management Learning & Education, September 2006, is devoted to the topic of how
ethics might be brought to business students in higher education. Some of these issues are
whether ethics can and should be taught at all, whether it should be taught as a stand-alone
course, integrated into existing courses, or both, and how it might best be delivered.
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The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the leading
international body for accreditation of business schools, started requiring inclusion of ethics in
business school curricula in the mid 1980s (McWilliams and Nahavandi, 2006). In the 1990s,
ethics and social responsibility were de-emphasized in many business schools (Evans and Marcal
2005). In 2004, AACSB created an Ethics Education Task Force that culminated in a white
paper to “renew and revitalize their commitment to teaching ethical responsibility at both the
individual and corporate level”. In response to the call from AACSB, Standard 15 now calls for
business undergraduate degree programs to include learning experiences in ethical
understanding, and for undergraduate and master’s degree programs to include ethical
responsibilities in organizations and society (Sleeper, Schneider, Weber, and Weber, 2006).
These standards illustrate the increasing importance of including business ethics education in the
curricula of its member institutions by stating that, “Although AACSB has insisted on the
inclusion of ethics in business curricula for many years, it has responded to recent revelations of
corporate malfeasance by searching for ways to strengthen its role in preparing socially
responsible graduates for management careers” (Sleeper, Schneider, Weber, and Weber, 2006).
Research provides mixed results on how business students view ethics education. Most
students report that there should be ethical standards in business (Crane, 2004), that studying
ethics is valuable (Power and Lundsten, 2001), and that they are interested in having meaningful
discussions on ethics as part of their education (Adkins and Radtke, 2004). At the same time,
one recent study found that less than 5% of perspective MBA students felt that ethics education
was an important part of an MBA education (Dobie, 10). MBA programs are caught in between.
Just the title of a recent article, “Business Schools: A Failing Grade on Ethics” (Business Week,
Feb 6, 2009), expresses the problem that programs have in providing adequate ethics education.
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Too often, the article suggests, it is done by either focusing on studying a recent scandal in a 90
minute case study or by simply recognizing the difficulty of teaching ethics and avoiding the
subject area altogether. In response, it has been suggested that programs need to make a
concerted effort to make corporate social responsibility and ethics integral to curriculum (Gioia,
2002).
While the need for ethics in business education is continuous and great, the degree to
which it takes place, how it is implemented, and its level of formality, vary greatly. Just 16% of
reporting universities noted that they required completion of a stand-alone business ethics course
from their graduates (Stewart, Felicetti, and Kuehn, 1996). Meanwhile, 83% of the schools
report that they had chosen to integrate business ethics into each functional area of their program
(Evans and Robertson, 2003). In a 1988 nationwide survey of AACSB member schools, it was
reported that 91% of responding institutions had at least one course where the professor had
devoted at least 10% of class time to the teaching of ethics (Schoenfeldt et al., 1991). More
recently, we find that many AACSB accredited schools, such as Mendoza College of Business at
the University of Notre Dame and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern
University included new ethics coverage in their MBA curricula (Beggs and Dean, 2007).
Evans and Marcal (2005) note that if students are not exposed to ethically challenging
situations in school, they will be unprepared for and more likely to fail in providing needed
ethical leadership when they enter business. Those who support teaching business ethics
advocate that ethics education can help students acquire the knowledge and skills to make proper
judgments about the ethical dimensions of economic activities. The emphasis is on building
competences to help students identify, analyze, judge, and evaluate ethical matters in business,
and to help them apply ethics to real-life business decisions (Rossouw, 2002; Sims, 2002).
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Many studies indicate the uses that may accrue from ethics education. Besides the more
obvious benefits of reinforcing values and teaching ethical reasoning (Menzell, 1997), and
raising awareness of moral issues, McWilliams and Nahavandi (2006), ethics education can lead
to more complex and flexible thinking and can help students to identify, analyze, judge, and
evaluate complex issues (Sims, 2002; Carlson and Burke, 1998). So, by exposing students to
ethical concepts and applications, business schools can better prepare students to make nonprogrammed decisions of any kind.
How can ethics education be integrated in the curriculum?
Some say that the problem with business ethics education is that we do not teach it well
(Gioia, 2002). Sims (2004) suggests that business schools should take on a strong and more
focused role in teaching ethics through carefully designed curricula and use of a variety of
methods (Felton and Sims, 2005; Sims and Felton, 2006). In a survey of AACSB deans, the
majority responded that their business school infuses ethics through integration in the core
curriculum of their MBA programs. A much smaller number also require a stand-alone course,
and less than 10% rely exclusively on a stand-alone course on ethics. In another survey, most
MBA faculty recommended integration into core courses to increase effectiveness of ethics
education (McDonald, 2004). When asked to recommend one change to improve ethics and
social responsibility in their school, 28% indicated that the most effective change is the further
integration of ethics topics into core courses (Woo, 2003). However, in a study among Business
Week readers on how ethics should be taught, the majority of respondents (64%) thought ethics
should be taught as a stand-alone course for MBA students, with fewer respondents (27%)
favoring an integrated approach (Business Week Online, 2003).
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What is the effect of business ethics education?
Some ethics education has reported remarkable success. Researchers have found that
business students that took an ethics course will be better at recognizing ethical issues (Gautschi
III and Jones, 1998), will have better ethical decision-making skills (Wu, 2003), while
Desplaces, et al. (2007) found that simply adding ethics related discussions improved ethical
issue recognition.
Looking at it from another angle, it is informative to see what the top business schools
do. While we saw before that just 16% of all reporting business schools require an ethics course,
that number jumps to 27% (32% when also counting corporate social responsibility as an ethics
course) when isolating just the top 50 programs as reported by The Financial Times (2006) and
to 40% when using standards set by Navarro (2008). While it is obvious that there is a positive
association between requiring ethics education and program excellence, it remains unclear which
is the cause and which the effect.
Pedagogy
One last issue to consider here is methodology. It should come as no surprise that choice
of pedagogy can affect the level of student interest and excitement in the material (Sleeper,
Schneider, Weber, and Weber, 2006), as well as their understanding and memory (Jayabal &
Babu, 2005). In a seminal work on teaching methods, Wilkinson (1984) suggests that the three
primary tools are lecture, lab session or field trip, and discussion session. While recognizing
other methods, he explains that like the three primary colors can be used to make any color, so a
combination of lecture, lab or field trip, and discussion are at the core of any teaching
methodology. He goes on to say that lecture has an advantage when disseminating information
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and providing examples but not in stimulating responses. Labs and field trips are beneficial for
direct contact and illustrative vividness but have no foundation. Discussion can provide a depth
of insight from a multitude of perspectives but can lack structure and predictability. In
pedagogical studies, Morgan et. al. (2000) found that lecture combined with discussion produced
a higher level of retention than cooperative learning but this advantage did not last over the
longer term and Armbruster et. al: (2009), found that students perceived their engagement and
their performance improved when active learning techniques were added to their courses.
In a study conducted to ascertain the weighting of various pedagogies utilized in the 25
top-ranked U.S. MBA business schools, it was found that the primary tools are case studies
(42.6%), lecture (37.2%), experiential learning (16.2%), and simulation (12.5%). Smaller
weightings were allocated to projects and to discussions. (Jayabal & Babu, 2005). When
isolating out ethics, the top schools tend to teach ethics with a combination of lecture and
discussion (Freehafer, 2005). Overall, there is little to conclude from these studies except that
there are a variety of teaching methods available, each of them have limitations and strengths,
and some types of courses may be more suited toward one method or combination of methods
while other courses may do better with a different palate of methods.
METHOD
The school under study here was recently encouraged by AACSB to make a concerted
effort to evaluate, implement, and assess business ethics as a part of its MBA program. This
process began in fall 2009 with the program’s fall retreat. The professor in charge of the
capstone course was given responsibility to review current practices and views, test market some
techniques, and report back to faculty at the fall 2011 meeting. To begin, an AACSB seminar on
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business ethics education was attended. The essentials from the seminar were then condensed
and set into the framework of the existing capstone course to be tested on the twenty-four
students taking the course in spring quarter 2010.
Students were informed at the beginning of the term about the objectives of the professor
and school. They were also told that their course would be used as a test case and that they
would be consulted for input. The course has always been focused around the business
simulation, “The Business Strategy Game”. The students participate in this simulation by
running their own fictitious athletic shoe company in a competitive environment against the
other students in the course. At the end of the course, they are required to create a
comprehensive annual report that illustrates their mastery of each discipline including
accounting, finance, management, and marketing. In the revamped course, course credit was
increased from 3 quarter units to 5 quarter units. In addition to the earlier assignments, students
were also exposed to lecture material on business ethics in both theory and application. Next,
they were tested on the material with a multiple choice and short answer quiz. Following the
quiz was a case study – British Petroleum (BP) and the oil spill – that required each student to
review the case, its issues, and discuss the descriptive and prescriptive aspects of the situation in
regards to business ethics. A third addition to the course was the requirement that each student
create a corporate social responsibility report for their fictitious corporation. This assignment
called for a comprehensive social audit to address the needs of each important stakeholder group.
Finally, students were asked to complete a survey that asked about their views on
business ethics education in the course and program. This survey consisted of twenty-one
questions that called for a response on a 5-point likert scale with the range of possible responses
going from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree). The first nine questions asked students
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the degree to which they felt more of the course should be devoted to business ethics. This was
broken into options of in general, lecture, discussion, debate, case study, experiential exercise,
service project, simulation, and other. The next nine questions were the same but asked about
the program instead of just the course. The final three questions asked whether the course and
the program effectively provided a working understanding of business ethics and whether the
program should offer a stand-alone business ethics course. An analysis was also conducted on
the results of a survey on the methods used in providing business ethics education at the twentyfive top rated MBA programs in the U.S. (Jayabal & Babu, 2005).
Toward the end of the course, students were offered the opportunity to assist in a
research project taken from the course. The offer came with no stated hurdle of commitment and
no opportunity for course credit of any kind. The offer was publicly announced in class and
responses were solicited by email. Of the twenty-four students in the course, three responded.
These three have been very active in all stages of the research project from literature review to
the final product. Two of the three are also presenting the paper, with the third unable to attend
because of visa issues.
RESULTS
In Jayabal and Babu’s work (2005) on the evaluation of business ethics teaching methods
used at the top twenty-five U.S. business programs, there is a chart that breaks out the percentage
of efforts that each school devotes to case study, lecture, experiential learning, simulation, and
other pedagogy. In our work, we recombine their categories into the three provided by
Wilkinson (1984); discussion, lecture, and lab study or field trip. In these schools, the mean time
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devoted to discussion, lecture and lab or field was 41.8%, 37.2%, and 21.0%, respectively (see
Table 1). Looking at correlations, we found that there was a positive relationship between the
devotion to discussion and school ranking and a negative correlation between both lecture and
lab or field study and ranking. With such a small sample size, it is not surprising that none of
these relationships were significant at the 95% confidence level.
In the survey taken in our course, students were asked to rate their views on a 5-point
likert scale where 1 = strongly agree and 5 = strongly disagree. In questions regarding whether
more time should be devoted to teaching business ethics, the program mean was 1.8 while the
course mean was 2.0. Looking more carefully at this last question mean responses for
pedagogical alternatives were 2.5 for lecture, 1.4 for discussion, 2.2 for debate, 2.4 for case
study, 2.1 for experiential exercise, 2.9 for service project, and 2.2 for simulation. While
pedagogical scores were all lower for the program, the largest deviations came from lecture and
service project, which were 2.0 and 2.4, respectively (see Table 2).
When asked whether the course effectively provided a working understanding of business
ethics, the mean response was 2.3. The same question about the total program yielded 2.4, and
there was a strong positive correlation between these two. The average score for whether there
should be a stand-alone business ethics requirement was 2.7. This question had a significant and
negative correlation between the two prior questions. When asked whether more of the course
should be devoted to business ethics, the mean response was 2.0. More specifically, when asked
what method they would most agree for providing ethics in the course, the responses varied from
1.4 for discussion to 2.4 for case study, 2.5 for lecture and 2.9 for service project. When asked
the same question about the program, the score was 1.7 for agreement that more of the program
should be devoted to business ethics. Compared with the course responses, the largest changes
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came from greater agreement for the case study approach (1.9) and with service projects (2.4).
Looking at correlations between methods, we find that all significant relationships have strong
positive relationships. Looking strictly at the course, these relationships hold between discussion
and lecture (.645) (see Table 3), between experiential and debate (.718), between simulation and
debate (.784), and between simulation and experiential (.660). There are similar findings
between pedagogies when looking program-wide.
DISCUSSION
In our survey, it is important to remember that for any question, a lower score means a
stronger affirmative agreement. In every question, students mean score is less than 2.9 (see
Table 2). This seems to indicate an overall interest in the study of business ethics for these
students. Recall that students self-reported means scores of 2.3 and 2.2, respectively, when
asked whether the program and the course provided a working understanding of business ethics.
Since this course was designated as the venue for formal integration of business ethics into the
program, it is not surprising that it would score lower than the program as a whole. It is also
consistent that since the course score is fairly low, so is the program score. However, a great
many students still think there is ample room for improvement. When looking carefully at the
data, we find that 33% agreed that more of the course should be devoted to the topic of business
ethics and that 39% said the same about the program (see Table 4). Meanwhile, 50% felt that a
stand-alone ethics course should be part of the core curriculum. Therefore, it appears that while
about half of the students are satisfied or very satisfied, between about a third and one half think
that there should be one or more modifications to the curricula to add more ethics material. Of
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note here, though, is that because there is a significant and strong negative correlation between
the desire for a stand-alone course and the desire for additional integration, there are distinct
views about how and what additional material should be included in the program. Apparently
students can be just as conflicted as professors, employers, and philosophers when it comes to
such matters.
Looking further into pedagogy, it is interesting to note that by far the most agreed upon
technique was discussion at 1.44. This was followed by lecture at 2.50 and service project at
2.89. Remember that in the evaluation of techniques used by the top 25 programs, discussion
was the most prevalent at 41.8%, lecture at 37.2% and lab and field work was the least used at
21.0%. While there is no scientific significance between these numbers, it is noteworthy that the
students would choose the same ordering that the top 25 schools already provide. Still, these
relationships must be tempered when looking at the high degree of positive correlation between
the pedagogies. What the full analysis of this data is telling us is that the students who desire
additional ethics training in the capstone course want to receive it through more than one method
and those who don’t want any more ethics don’t want it in any of them. While this last point is
true for the course, it is accentuated for the program as a whole. We propose that the reason for
this is that students’ view that there is more opportunities that can take place within the program
than there is in just the capstone course. This would be especially true for service projects.
Given that the pedagogy showed the largest deviation between course and program, it is logical
to assume that students are comparatively interested in completing a service project that could
take place over the course of many terms or even the entire program.
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CONCLUSION
Recent events such as the financial crisis and BP oil spill point out the widespread
devastation that can occur when ethics is left out of the equation for business. Most recently, the
revelation that Mark Hurd, the CEO at Hewlett-Packard, had simply shown a brief and somewhat
questionable lapse in moral judgment has had the effect of Mr. Hurd losing his job and HP losing
$10 billion in market value in just one day and $14.5 billion in a week (Reinhardt, 2010) (it took
Mr. Hurd more than five years as CEO to add $44.6 billion of value to the company) (Ogg,
2010). These events point out that having both an understanding of moral issues and the
fortitude to serve above reproach are essential for the successful business executive. Therefore,
business ethics, rather than being an afterthought, should be a critical component of any MBA
program. It is, however, a tricky one to implement. Views are not consistent across students as
to how business ethics should be taught, where it should be taught, or even whether it should be
taught. What can be identified from this study is that there is definitely a place for business
ethics in a capstone course as well as in other core courses. Furthermore, it is wise to consider
having a stand-alone business course as an elective or even as part of the required core. Finally,
it is important to address the topic from an array of pedagogies that should deliberately include a
combination of discussion, lecture, and lab or field study techniques.
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APPENDICES
Table 1: Teaching methods – use (%) (original data collected by Jayabal & Babu, 2005).
Rank
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
B-school
Discussion
Lecture
Lab/Field
55
33
80
45
40
40
40
40
70
25
55
30
37
30
40
40
35
50
35
40
30
30
45
30
50
30
33
15
30
45
40
40
25
15
50
30
50
38
60
35
30
45
30
60
30
50
50
25
50
25
15
34
5
25
15
20
20
35
15
25
15
20
25
10
25
30
20
20
5
30
20
20
30
20
25
41.8
12.8
30.7%
25
37.2
12.5
33.6%
25
21.0
7.8
37.4%
25
Rank
1
Discussion
Lecture
Lab/Field
-.337
.100
.272
.188
.116
1
U of Penn (Wharton)
North Western (Kellogg)
Harvard
MIT (Sloan)
Duke (Fuqua)
Michigan
Columbia
Cornell (Johnson)
Virginia (Darden)
Chicago
Stanford
UCLA (Anderson)
NYU (Stern)
Carnegie Mellon
UNC - Chapel Hill
Dartmouth (Tuck)
Texas (Austin Mc-Lombs)
UC - Berkely (Hass)
Yale
Indiana (Kelley)
Rochester (Simon)
Vanderbilt (Owen)
Washington U (Olin)
USC (Marshall)
Purdue (Krannert)
ANALYSIS
Mean
S. Dev.
Coef. of Variation (%)
N
Pearson's Correlations
Rank
Discussion - correl.
signif (2-tailed)
Lecture - correl.
signif (2-tailed)
Lab/Field - correl.
.580
**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
signif (2-tailed)
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-.809**
.000
-.345
-.273
.092
.187
1
1
10th Global Conference on Business & Economics
ISBN : 978-0-9830452-1-2
Table 2: Business Ethics Survey – Scale is 1=strongly agree to 5=strongly disagree
Question
Mean
Mode
Std Dev
More of program should be devoted to ethics
1.8
2
0.71
More of capstone should be devoted to ethics
2.0
2
0.76
Capstone provides working understanding of ethics
2.3
2
0.91
Program provides working understanding of ethics
2.4
2
1.10
Program should have stand-alone ethics
2.7
2
1.08
Capstone through discussion
1.4
1
0.98
Capstone through experiential exercise
2.1
1
1.18
Capstone through debate
2.2
1
1.35
Capstone through simulation
2.2
2
1.19
Capstone through case study
2.4
3
1.25
Capstone through lecture
2.5
1
1.29
Capstone through service project
2.9
3
1.41
Program through discussion
1.6
1
0.98
Program through case study
1.9
1
1.08
Program through experiential exercise
2.0
1
1.33
Program through lecture
2.0
2
1.08
Program through simulation
2.1
2
1.26
Program through debate
2.2
1
1.34
Program through service project
2.4
1
1.33
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Capstone Provides BE
Program Provides BE
Program Stand-Alone
Devote More Capstone to BE
Capstone Thru Lecture
Capstone Thru Discussion
Capstone Thru Debate
Capstone Thru Case Study
Capstone Thru Experiential
Capstone Thru Service Proj.
Capstone Thru Simulation
Devote More Program to BE
Program Thru Lecture
Program Thru Discussion
Program Thru Debate
Program Thru Case Study
Program Thru Experiential
Program Thru Service Proj.
Program Thru Simulation
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
2
1
1
1
1
1
2
2
2
3
1
3
1
1
1
2
2
2
2
2
2.1
2.4
2
1.9
2.2
1.6
2
1.8
2.2
2.9
2.1
2.4
2.2
1.4
2.5
2
2.7
2.4
2.3
2.1
1.26
1.33
1.33
1.08
1.34
0.98
1.08
0.71
1.19
1.41
1.18
1.25
1.35
0.98
1.29
0.76
1.08
1.10
0.91
1.01
*. Correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (1-tailed).
**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (1-tailed).
Capstone Mode
1
Mode Mean S. Dev.
Nonparametric Correlations
Spearman's rho (1-tailed)
Question
Variable
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
.452
-.232
.178
-.182
.234 .147
-.090 .545**
.362 .010
-.289 .334
.122
.343 .092
-.045 -.190
.429 .226
-.097 -.291
.350 .121
-.235 -.154
.174 .271
.279 -.097
.131 .351
.041 -.126
.436
.309
.341 .274
.062 .252
.404 .156
-.251 .406 *
.157 .047
-.030 .152
.236 .232
-.098 -.160
.349 .263
-.103 -.327
.088
.273
.026
.459
.261
.160
.392
.172
.175
.244
.256
.461
.059
12
13
.035
.005
.186
.001
14
15
16
17
18
.640
.028 .003
**
.462 *
.031
.003
19
20
.395 .182 .058 .000 .066
.
.315 .465 * .546 ** .545 ** .350 .562 ** 1.000
.224 .026 .010 .010 .077 .008
.
.221 .271 .387 .775 ** .604 ** .817 ** .731 ** 1.000
.299 .138 .056 .000 .004 .000 .000
.
.100
.
-.092 .617 1.000
.362 .051
.
.093 .679 * .714 ** 1.000
.361 .032 .000
.
.596 ** -.264 .370 .431 * 1.000
.006 .264 .065 .037
.
.220 .679 * .558 ** .622 ** .546 ** 1.000
.198 .032 .008 .003 .010
.
.630 ** -.113 .228 .383 .778 ** .370 1.000
.258 .000 .076
.
.360 .460 * .482 * .613 ** 1.000
.071 .027 .021 .003
.
.224 .784 ** .207 .660 ** .419 * 1.000
.193 .000 .213 .002 .047
.
.276 -.668 * -.137 -.077 -.056 -.507 1.000
11
.083 .168 .254 .035 .373 .428 .448
.497 .615** .501 * .174 -.165 .130 .016
.105 .003 .017 .245 .256 .303 .476
.365 .463 * .365 .226 .130 .385 .211
.187 .027 .068 .183 .304 .057 .201
.120 .213 .413 * .795 ** .191 .605 ** .247
.388 .198 .044 .000 .224 .004 .162
.592 .550** .417 * .324 .353 .287 .006
.061 .009 .042 .095 .075 .124 .491
-.248 .219 .296 .580 ** .099 .690 ** .362
.277 .191 .116 .006 .348 .001 .070
-.088 .449 * .530 * .384 -.094 .571 ** .568 **
.418 .031 .012 .058 .355 .007 .007
-.041 .381 .437 * .590 ** .224 .701 ** .458 *
.076
.645
.348
-.173
.182 .273
-.299 -.304
.364
.252
.449 .363 .159
-.340 .499 * -.649 *
.084 .018 .041
-.102 .091 -.557
.298 .323
.180 .060
.237 .406
.235 -.158
.622** 1.000
.003
.
.389 .544** 1.000
.056 .010
.
-.221 -.439* -.627** 1.000
.189 .034 .003
.
-.101 -.169 .465 -.280 1.000
.406 .345 .123 .251
.
.289 .072 -.086 .148 .320 1.000
.122 .388 .368 .280 .220
.
.144 -.112 -.303 .304 .365 .645** 1.000
.284 .329 .111 .110 .187 .002
.
.199 -.010 .001 -.047 -.408 .208 .389 1.000
.214 .485 .498 .426 .158 .204 .055
.
-.082 -.156 -.421 * -.038 -.414 -.027 .006 .419 * 1.000
.374 .268 .041 .441 .154 .458 .491 .042
.
.134 .116 -.032 .089 -.406 .237 .164 .718 ** .351 1.000
1.000
.
10th Global Conference on Business & Economics
ISBN : 978-0-9830452-1-2
Table 3: Business Ethics Survey – Correlations by Pedagogy for Capstone & Program
10th Global Conference on Business & Economics
ISBN : 978-0-9830452-1-2
Table 4: Business Ethics Survey – Agreement by Pedagogy for Capstone & Program
61%
Capstone eff. provides a working understanding of BE
(1,2)
Agree %
56%
Program eff. provides a working understanding of BE
(3,4,5)
Disagree %
50%
Program should have stand-alone course requirement
94%
Capstone through Discussion
94%
Program through Discussion
Program through Case Study
83%
Program through Lecture
83%
78%
Program through Simulation
72%
Capstone through Simulation
Program through Debate
67%
Capstone through Experiential Exercise
67%
Program through Experiential Exercise
67%
61%
Capstone through Debate
Capstone through Lecture
56%
Program through Service Project
56%
44%
Capstone through Case Study
Capstone through Service Project
39%
More program should be devoted to the topic of BE
39%
33%
More capstone should be devoted to the topic of BE
0%
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25
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%