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You Reap What You Sow: How MBA Programs Undermine Ethics

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Abstract

This paper argues that the MBA, probably the most successful academic program of the last 50 years, negatively affects the theory and practice of management with regard to ethics through its pedagogy, structure, and its underlying epistemic assumptions. In particular I seek to demonstrate how the syllabus, the pedagogy and the epistemological assumptions of MBA programs together make managers/leaders unable and unwilling to deal with ethics. I also argue that while the what (content) and the how (pedagogy) play a very important role, it was only the emergence of a radical philosophical underpinning (the why) that has put management education on a negative trajectory. The paper thus examines MBA education from a meta-level perspective, connecting the pedagogical model with epistemological beliefs.

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Notes

  1. Differentiating between leaders and managers is a “false dichotomy” (Mintzberg 2010), as managers always lead other people, whether they want to or not. The definition of a “manager” in organization theory is someone who has authority over other people, i.e., someone who leads. For the purposes of this paper it is irrelevant whether leadership is a function, an activity or a character trait.

  2. Albach is considered to be the most influential living German business administration scholar. Frustrated by yet another debate regarding the role of ethics in business, he concluded the dispute by declaring that ethics has no place in business theory and managers' behavior.

  3. Jackson (2011) provides an excellent critique of the case method. He points out ten problem areas and suggests serious modifications to case methods so that students are better prepared for the reality of the twenty-first-century.

  4. The two Honda (cars and motorcycles) case studies are maybe the most famous case studies. When, 20 years after Honda had conquered the US motorcycle market, an academic interviewed the decision-makers at Honda, he found that Honda made all possible mistakes (wrong time of year, wrong model, no housing for employees) and the decisions were also very “irrational” (i.e., entering the market with the 500 cc model was based on Soichiro Honda’s consideration of the similarity between the eyebrows of his favorite Buddha statue and the handlebars of that model as a good omen). MBA students were (and still are) told that is was meticulous planning and application of the SWOT model that made Honda succeed. Pascale (1984) quoted in Mintzberg et al. 1998, pp. 201–207).

  5. I do not want to go into the long debate between Williams and Friedman. Suffice it to say, that the leading epistemologist in economics, traces the whole debate and calls Friedman's arguments an "embarrassment" Blaug (1992, p.138).

  6. I oversimplify the situation. I do not believe that one can simply break down human decision-making influencers into the two separate concepts, ratio and emotio. They are intertwined.

  7. Schrempp was made an honorary professor because of his “great service to the community” after destroying over 75% of his company’s stock value and simultaneously quadrupling his salary.

  8. The German Corporate Governance Kodex (http://www.corporate-governance-code.de/) limits the number of non-executive directorships to five. Many signatories to the Kodex ignore this and other provisions of the Kodex.

  9. Eastman and Bailey (1998) see the “fact-value antimony” as one of the major themes of the evolution of management theory. They identify three modes of mediation in the period under review (1890–1990). Economism mediates between values and facts by pretending that they are separable. They call this mode “formalism” (1998, p. 232) and, according to them, it ended in the 1930s (p. 233).

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  1. Kühne Logistics University – Wissenschaftliche Hochschule für Logistik und Unternehmensführung (The KLU), Brooktorkai 20, 20457, Hamburg, Germany

    Matthias Philip Hühn

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Hühn, M.P. You Reap What You Sow: How MBA Programs Undermine Ethics. J Bus Ethics 121, 527–541 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1733-z

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