Skip to Content

Stanford Business magazine

 
  • Email
  • Print
  • Share

Preventing Corruption

 

MBA Classes Address Ethics, Cheating

FIRST-YEAR MBA STUDENTS at the GSB take a required course on ethical analysis called Ethics and Management, but the discussion of ethics does not end there. Faculty incorporate case studies and 

discussions of ethical issues into a variety of classes, some of which are specifically about ethics, such as Corporate Fraud and Ethical Issues in the Biotech Industry taught by Margaret Eaton. Understanding Cheating, a course taught by Maureen McNichols, looks at the psychological, economic, and organizational factors that motivate cheating in business, academia, and sports, and the implications for managers.

Deborah Gruenfeld delves into the issue of cheating as part of her organizational behavior courses. She begins one class with an example of a manufacturing firm whose employees knew they were making an unsafe product. “The point is to drive home the observation that situations are very powerful,” she says, but most students’ initial reaction is that the people involved were morally flawed and did things that they themselves or most other people would not do.

Then Gruenfeld presents a different situation with incomplete information and asks students to state publicly what they would do. As she gives them more information, it becomes clear that one decision based on incomplete data is now difficult to justify. Despite the new information, the “vast majority” of students who had publically committed to the wrong decision stick with it. “They fight tooth and nail not to change their minds,” she says. 

The exercise shows “the students that they need to understand how situations affect their behavior,” Gruenfeld says, so they can see the pitfalls when they are leading organizations themselves. “If there was an easy answer to this, we wouldn’t have to talk about it for five weeks.”