Ethics Training and Workplace Ethical Decisions of MBA Professionals

Abstract

We recruited 15 MBA professionals in the St. Louis, Missouri metropolitan area to explore experiences and perceptions of classroom ethics training and ethical experiences in the workplace. Telephone interviews were conducted using open-ended questions to collect data that were uploaded to NVivo 10 for qualitative analysis. As a result of the data analysis, seven themes were recognized: (a) effective decision-making; (b) combining classroom instruction with real-world experience; (c) reasoning through an ethical issue; (d) resolution of workplace ethical issues; (e) feelings about ethics and corporate fraud; (f) fear of employer retaliation; and (g) expectations of management. One unexpected finding was that managers do not resolve ethical issues that the participants expect and that managers need more ethics training. The importance of human resources department was noted in dealing with ethical issues. A disturbing finding was the strong fear of retaliation for reporting an unethical issue. The self-assessment of the quality of ethics training in their MBA programs was mixed.

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