The courage to exhibit leadership in ethically confusing environments by confronting and engaging with ethical issues publicly and openly; the discounting of status risks in ethical decision making.
Published in Chapter:
Defining Integrity for Individuals and Organizations: A Cognitive-Linguistic Modeling Approach
Jane Robbins (University of Arizona, USA)
Copyright: © 2012
|Pages: 20
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61350-510-6.ch008
Abstract
Business schools thus have an obligation to teach students to engage with ethical complexity as part of preparing them for their future roles as decision makers in complex environments. The recommended approach in this chapter is the development by each student of a Personal Reflective Ethical Perspective (PREP), a definitional and visual model of the student’s conception of the relationships among ethics, morals, beliefs, integrity, and the law. This provides students with a clear, chosen concretization of their own views to take with them into the corporate world, where their own perspective will, invariably, come into conflict with other personal, professional, and organizational perspectives. Supported by explicit training in identifying, reasoning, challenging, and defending ethical stances, the exercise has an overarching goal to help students develop the following attributes: ethical alertness, ethical ear, ethical credibility, ethical voice, ethical clarity, and ethical confidence. Students find the exercise difficult but useful.