The Importance of Ethics in Business Education
Babson management professors James Hunt, Melissa Manwaring and Danna Greenberg are contributing authors to Educating for Responsible Management: Putting Theory into Practice published by the Principles for Responsible Management Education and Greenleaf Publishing. They have authored a chapter entitled Walking the Talk: Empowering undergraduate business students to act on their own values. This chapter outlines the importance of teaching ethics in business education, and that doesn’t just mean making business ethics a required course for graduation.
Most business schools incorporate business and ethics into their curriculum and many accrediting institutions require ethics education in business schools, but is it working? The Babson management team, Hunt, Manwaring, and Greenberg, outline the way values based education is used at Babson through the first year experiential course Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship (FME) and the effect it is having on the students.
They introduce an action-oriented approach to responsible management education that focuses on developing student’ ability to both recognize and act on value-based conflicts. The curriculum framework is entitled Giving Voice to Values (GVV), which is designed to support the development of the competences and self-efficacy needed to proactively address value-based conflicts.
The Babson management team has seen great success in the use of Giving Voice to Values in FME and in this chapter they outline how to teach students to decide what is right and to take action.