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A Novel Approach to Business Ethics Training: Improving Moral Reasoning in Just a Few Weeks

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Abstract

I assessed change in students’ moral reasoning following five 75-min classes on business ethics and two assignments utilizing a novel pedagogical approach designed to foster ethical reasoning skills. To minimize threats to validity present in previous studies, an untreated control group design with pre- and post-training measures was used. Training (n = 114) and control (n = 76) groups comprised freshmen business majors who completed the Defining Issues Test before and after the training. Results showed that, controlling for pre-training levels of moral reasoning, students in the training group demonstrated higher levels of post-training principled moral judgment than students in the control group.

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Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the School of Business Administration, University of Vermont, for providing funding for this research; the Dean of the School of Business Administration, Rocki DeWitt, for supporting this project since its inception; Jeffery Stein for assisting with data collection and other research assistance; Amy Tomas, the co-instructor of the course in which business ethics was taught, for providing logistical and other support; and Matthew Bovee and Thomas Chittenden, the instructors of the course from which control group participants were sampled, for their willingness to adapt their course format to facilitate this research.

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  1. The University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, U.S.A.

    David Allen Jones

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Jones, D.A. A Novel Approach to Business Ethics Training: Improving Moral Reasoning in Just a Few Weeks. J Bus Ethics 88, 367–379 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-008-9969-8

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