Business Education and ItsRelationship to Student

Personal Moral Philosophiesand Attitudes Toward Profits:

An Empirical Responseto Critics

DONALD O. NEUBAUMOregon State University

MARK PAGELLYork University

JOHN A. DREXLER, JR.Oregon State University

FRANCES M. MCKEE-RYANUniversity of Nevada–Reno

ERIK LARSONOregon State University

Critics of business education (e.g., Ghoshal, 2005; Mitroff, 2004) place much of the blamefor recent ethical scandals on the lack of moral development of managers and theamoral, “profits-first” theoretical underpinnings of business education. To empirically testthese claims, we surveyed 1,080 business and nonbusiness students from a major researchuniversity. The results suggest that neither the personal moral philosophies of businessand nonbusiness students, nor the personal moral philosophies of business freshmen andbusiness seniors differed significantly. Based on our results, we found no evidence tosupport the claims of critics who suggest business education is associated with negativepersonal moral philosophies of students. Further, the attitudes of business freshmen andbusiness seniors concerning profit and sustainability differed significantly, yet in thedirection opposite the one Ghoshal (2005) and others would have predicted. Thus,blaming the rash of ethical scandals on the amoral and “profits-first” theoreticalunderpinnings of business school training might be too simplistic of an approach.

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It is natural to look to business school education tohelp explain the behavior of managers. Academics,especially, would like to believe their efforts posi-tively influence their students. Unfortunately, manyof the recent discussions of business schools havecentered not on the good their graduates do, but onhow the theoretical foundations of business schooleducation may be linked to ethical lapses and scan-

dals involving managers who have been subjectedto business school training (e.g., Ghoshal, 2005;Mitroff, 2004; Schneider, 2002). How business schooleducation affects the personal moral philosophiesand attitudes on profit and sustainability of businessstudents is a focal point in this debate (Pfeffer, 2005).

Critics, such as Ghoshal (2005) and Mitroff (2004),place much of the blame for recent scandals and

� Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2009, Vol. 8, No. 1, 9–24.

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the apparent lack of ethical reasoning of today’smanagers on the theoretical underpinnings ofbusiness education. They argue that by emphasiz-ing amoral theories such as agency theory andtransaction-cost economics, business schools traintheir graduates to focus too exclusively on profitsat the expense of other goals accepted as part of aeconomically and socially sustainable firm, suchas the welfare of employees or concern for thenatural environment. Mitroff (2004) offers a partic-ularly scathing assessment, saying businessschool faculty are “guilty of having provided anenvironment where the Enrons and the Andersensof the world could take root and flourish . . . wedelude ourselves seriously if we think we playedno part whatsoever” (Mitroff, 2004: 185). Mitroff sug-gests such unethical practices are promulgated bybusiness schools’ mean-spirited, distorted viewof human nature and a narrow, outdated view ofpersonal ethics. Ghoshal (2005) provides one ofthe most discussed critiques of business schooleducation. His primary thesis is that today’sbusiness education, with its foundations inagency theory and economic liberalism, signifi-cantly contributed to the recent stream of uneth-ical business practices:

By propagating ideologically inspired amoraltheories, business schools have actively freedtheir students from any sense of moral re-sponsibility (Ghoshal, 2005: 76).

The question of why individuals make differentmoral judgments when facing the same set of cir-cumstances has long troubled researchers (Sharp,1898; Freud, 1927; Kohlberg, 1983). As ethical schol-ars suggest, individuals, when confronting an eth-ical decision, deliberate differently, each interpret-ing and processing the situation within the contextof his or her own personal moral philosophy. Per-sonal moral philosophies are defined as the set ofbeliefs, attitudes, and values providing a frame-work for shaping and considering ethical dilem-mas (Barnett, Bass, & Brown, 1994). These personalmoral philosophies represent the foundationwithin which ethical decisions are made, as theyoffer ethical guidance to individuals (Forsyth &Nye, 1990) and influence their propensity to act.Ethical theorists conclude that individuals’ ethicaldecision making is influenced and directed bytheir personal moral philosophies, yet the extent ofthat influence is dependent on a number of contex-tual concerns (Kurtines, 1984).

Executives who make seemingly immoral deci-sions do so, in part, because their personal moralphilosophies guide them to actions others see as

inappropriate. But, by placing blame for the im-moral or unethical decisions managers makesquarely on an educational philosophy built onamoral theories, gloomy views, and shareholdermaximization, Ghoshal (2005), Mitroff (2004), andothers implicitly, and often explicitly, assumebusiness school education has a deleterious influ-ence on the personal moral philosophies and profitand sustainability attitudes of students. Despitethe fact indicted executives, such as Enron’s An-drew Fastow, Kenneth Lay, and WorldCom’sBernie Ebbers (the first two who actually receivedtheir undergraduate degrees from economics pro-grams outside the College of Business, the latterwith an undergraduate degree in physical educa-tion), were years past their university training andworked in an organizational context far removedfrom the classroom, critics say business schoolsneed to “own up to their role” (Ghoshal, 2005: 75)and “share part of the blame” (Mitroff, 2004: 185) forshaping the ethical values of these and other un-scrupulous executives. In addition, the popularpress supports this argument when it highlightsthe absence or inadequacy of ethical training inbusiness schools. These articles tend to appearafter a major business scandal surfaces (e.g., Busi-nessWeek, 2003; Enbar, 1998; Hindo, 2002; Krehm-eyer, 2007; Lavelle, 2006; Schneider, 2001). WhileGhoshal (2005), Mitroff (2004), and others representpassionate voices in this debate, we believe thequestion of what influence business school educa-tion has on the attitudes of its graduates remainsone needing considerable empirical testing.

If Ghoshal (2005) and Mitroff (2004) are correct,then we might expect to find some differences inthe personal moral philosophies of students whowere and were not exposed to business schooltraining. But as Pfeffer (2005), who joins Ghoshal inhis criticism of business school education, sug-gests, there is an unanswered question in terms ofself-selection. Pfeffer (2005) asks whether unethicalmanagerial behavior is the result of personalmoral philosophies molded by business school in-doctrination, or whether those seeking businessdegrees already possess personal moral philoso-phies consistent with the amoral theoretical tenetsof maximizing shareholder value. In other words,do business students enter business school withamoral, profit-driven personal attitudes?

In response to these charges levied against busi-ness schools and their students, we hope to pro-vide insights into the role business school educa-tion might play in shaping the personal moralphilosophies of business students. Further, ourstudy examines college students’ adoption of the“profits-first” attitudes supposedly promulgated

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within business school education. If business ed-ucation is, indeed, amoral and profits focused,then we would expect to find business students,and in particular, business school seniors, to pos-sess amoral personal philosophies and strong at-titudes about the supremacy of profits. Thus, ourstudy attempts to make three important contribu-tions to this on-going discussion. First, we comparethe personal moral philosophies and profit andsustainability attitudes of business students andnonbusiness students. If critics of business schooleducation are indeed correct, then we would ex-pect to see differences between the personal moralphilosophies and profit and sustainability atti-tudes of these two groups. Second, to answer Pfef-fer’s (2005) question about self-selection, we com-pare the personal moral philosophies and profitand sustainability attitudes of freshmen entering abusiness program to those of freshmen enteringnonbusiness programs. Thus, we attempt to deter-mine if students with certain personal moral phi-losophies or profit and sustainability attitudes aremore likely to pursue a degree in business thanother degrees. Third, while some prior researchhas examined the ethical attitudes of business stu-dents, (e.g., Borkowski & Ugras, 1998; Tse & Au,1997; McCabe & Trevino 1995), no study has com-pared the personal moral philosophies or profitand sustainability attitudes of business studentswho are at different points in their college careers.If business school education affects students’ per-sonal moral philosophies and profit and sustain-ability attitudes, then we would expect the moralphilosophies and profit and sustainability atti-tudes of seniors who are business majors to bedifferent from those of freshmen who are businessmajors.

In the section below, we offer a series of hypoth-eses of the relationships just presented. Next, wepresent the sample, methods, and results of ourstudy. We conclude with a discussion of the study’simplications and limitations and offer some pos-sible explanations and implications to futureresearchers, business school academics, andmanagers.

THEORY

As suggested above, business school critics suchas Ghoshal (2005) and Mitroff (2004), level two dif-ferent, but related, charges against the pedagogyand practices of business school educators. First,they suggest business school education is amoral,and believe its theoretical foundations influencethe process managers use to make ethical deci-sions. By placing part of the blame for the ethical

scandals at Enron and alike on business schooleducation, Ghoshal (2005) and Mitroff (2004) as-sume, and forcefully claim, that business schoolshave a hand in shaping the moral fabric of theirstudents. Second, critics, such as Mitroff (2004), be-lieve business school education overly emphasizesa “profits-first” doctrine, which teaches students toignore other important goals and stakeholders,such as concern for employees or care for the nat-ural environment. In the paragraphs below, webriefly discuss these two criticisms, and presentour hypotheses. But first, we review the extant lit-erature on personal moral philosophies.

Personal Moral Philosophies

Individuals’ ethical decisions are made within thecontext of their personal moral philosophy, definedas the set of beliefs, attitudes, and values provid-ing a framework for considering ethical dilemmas(Barnett, Bass, & Brown, 1994). Within a businesssetting, individuals’ moral judgment involves thesame psychological and interpersonal processesthat shape their interpretation of nonbusiness eth-ical issues. Individuals, however, often disagreewhen making ethical judgments. These disagree-ments are, in fact, the result of differences in thepersonal moral philosophies the individuals adopt(Sharp, 1898).

While the sheer number of personal moral phi-losophies individuals adopt is endless, Forsyth’s(1980) seminal work suggests that individuals’ eth-ical frameworks can be described and capturedparsimoniously along two orthogonal dimensions:relativism and idealism. Relativism reflects a per-son’s adherence to universal rules of behavior, re-gardless of the situation. As an individual’s rela-tivism increases, so does their adherence tosituational ethics (Forsyth, 1992). The higher anindividual’s level of relativism, the more likelythey would reject the notion of the existence ofuniversal law, moral codes, and societal norms.For example, someone who rejects universal mor-als would believe certain behaviors (e.g., lying tocustomers or treating employees poorly) are ac-ceptable in the pursuit of profits, even if the samebehaviors are not acceptable in other realms. Incontrast, individuals rejecting relativism believemorality requires consistent application of moralprinciples, rules, and norms, regardless of the set-ting. For example, an individual low in relativismbelieves lying is always wrong and will avoidlying even if it means giving someone else a dam-aging performance appraisal or missing out onclosing a big sales contract. Critics of businessschool education (e.g., Ghoshal, 2005; Mitroff, 2004)

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would argue that exposure to agency theory, trans-action-costs economics, and economic liberalismanalysis would push students to become more rel-ativistic over time, causing them to reject univer-sally accepted moral rules and principles andbend the rules and their moral yardsticks.

The second dimension of personal moral philos-ophies is idealism. Idealism reflects a person’s un-willingness to do harm to other members of soci-ety, regardless of other outcomes (Forsyth, 1992).The higher an individual’s level of idealism, themore strongly the individual possesses a funda-mental concern for the welfare of others. Idealisticmanagers, for example, would not approve givingraises to high-performing employees if it meantsome other employees might have to be laid off topay for the increased wages. They seek to avoidharming others. Individuals scoring low on ideal-ism, on the other hand, may make ethical judg-ments recognizing some harm might be necessaryto produce good outcomes. Critics (e.g., Ghoshal,2005; Mitroff, 2004) of business schools claim busi-ness schools train future managers to be only con-cerned with increasing profits. This singular, over-riding focus on profitability would be consistentwith lower levels of idealism.

Prior research has shown that personal moralphilosophies conceptualized along the dimensionsof relativism and idealism are related to individu-als’ attitudes, judgments, and behaviors (Forsyth,1992). For example, relativism and idealism havebeen linked to attitudes on a wide variety of socialissues, including test-tube babies, euthanasia,marijuana use, homosexuality, abortion (Forsyth &Nye, 1990), and premarital and extramarital sex(Singh & Forsyth, 1989). Further studies haveshown relationships between relativism and ide-alism and how individuals judge others (Forsyth &Pope, 1984; Forsyth, 1985), or even themselves (For-syth & Berger, 1982). These latter studies haveshown that personal moral philosophies are re-lated to how individuals view themselves afterthey cheat or lie (e.g., positively or negatively,weak or strong, likable or unlikable), as highlyidealistic individuals devalued themselves afterthey cheated, while highly relativistic individualsreported more anxiety over fears of getting caught.

Profit and Sustainability Attitudes

In addition to being criticized for fostering amoralpersonal philosophies, business schools have alsobeen charged with promoting a “profits-first” doc-trine (Mitroff, 2004; Kochan, 2002). Consistent withthis attitude, the label sustainability has beenused to characterize the threefold responsibility of

a business to its owners, the environment, andsociety. A sustainable business herein reflectsmeeting the social and environmental, as well asthe economic needs of the present without compro-mising the ability of future generations to meettheir own needs (World Commission on EconomicDevelopment, 1987). Sustainable business prac-tices require a firm’s environmental and socialconcerns to be given the same weight as its eco-nomic responsibility. For example, sustainable en-vironmental practices include efforts to reducepackaging waste, reduce the emission of green-house gases, or using ingredients grown on pes-ticide- or chemical-free farmland. Sustainablesocial practices include progressive hiring oremployment practices, or supporting small, localsuppliers. Such practices would stand in starkcontrast to the tenets of transaction-costs eco-nomics and agency theory, which assume “hu-mans are completely and entirely ruthless, mo-tivated solely by greed, opportunistic and purelyselfish” (Mitroff, 2004: 185).

In the popular press, business schools have alsobeen accused of not teaching enough about socialresponsibility, as about only 66% of 122 schoolsresponding to a BusinessWeek survey claimed theyoffered courses on sustainability of the environ-ment and business (Schneider, 2001). Since discus-sions of sustainability are coming to prominence,we believe assessing students’ attitudes towardprofit and sustainability as well as examining howthese attitudes are associated with different levelsof business school education offers a rich andtimely perspective.

IS THERE A PROBLEM WITH BUSINESSSTUDENTS OR BUSINESS EDUCATION?

As previously suggested, many contemporary andwell-respected theorists (Ghoshal, 2005; Mitroff,2004; Pfeffer, 2005) criticize business schools andthe role they are believed to play in the recentwave of ethical scandals. Kochan (2002: 139) wentso far as to say these scandals are the result ofcorporations’ overemphasis on “maximizing share-holder value without regard for the effects of theiractions on other stakeholders.” In the section be-low, we briefly review the literature on the ethicalattitudes of business and nonbusiness students,then present a series of hypotheses that test theassertions made by Ghoshal (2005), Mitroff (2004),and others.

Within the context of ethical decision making,Barnett, Bass, and Brown (1994) found evidence thatForsyth’s dimensions of personal moral philoso-phies were related to individuals’ ethical judg-

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ments of business vignettes. In a follow-up paper,Barnett, Bass, and Brown (1996) discovered linksbetween individuals’ personal moral philosophiesand their intentions to report the wrongdoings ofpeers. Further, Barnett, Bass, Brown, and Hebert(1998) found that the personal moral philosophiesof marketing professionals were related to theirmoral judgments of ethical vignettes involvingmarketing activities. Together, these studies showthat personal moral philosophies are associatedwith how individuals make judgments about theethicality of different situations. More recently,Henle, Giacalone, and Jurkiewicz (2005) found sig-nificant relationships between Forsyth’s measuresof personal moral philosophy and workplace devi-ance. Specifically, individuals who scored loweron idealism were more likely to engage in organi-zational and interpersonal deviance (i.e., self-reported measures of how frequently individualsengaged in workplace deviance, such as takingproperty without permission or acting rudely tocoworkers). Additionally, the interaction of relativ-ism and idealism was significantly associatedwith organizational deviance. In a study using acomputer simulation that mimics the submissionof individual tax returns, Keller (1998) found thatidealism and relativism were associated with in-dividuals’ behavior, as those with higher levels ofrelativism and idealism were more likely to be-have unethically. Thus, idealism and relativismhave been shown to be related to the ethical atti-tudes, judgments, and behaviors of individuals inboth business and nonbusiness settings, andacross both student (graduate and undergraduate)and nonstudent samples. Further, prior researchhas also demonstrated the psychometric proper-ties of Forsyth’s measure of personal moral philos-ophies (e.g., Henle, Giacalone, & Jurkiewicz, 2005),such as predictive and discriminant validity, (e.g.,Leary, Knight, & Barnes, 1986), as well as a lack ofsocial desirability bias (e.g., Eastman, Eastman, &Tolson, 2001; Forsyth & Pope, 1984; and Singhapa-kdi, Kraft, Vitell, & Rallapalli, 1995).

Business vs. Nonbusiness Students

Borkowski and Ugras (1998) conducted a meta-analysis of 56 empirical studies published be-tween 1985 and 1994. These authors focused on theeffects of gender, age, and academic major on theethical attitudes of business students. In general,female students exhibited higher ethical attitudesthan male students, and older students exhibitedhigher ethical attitudes than younger students. Interms of major, however, these researchers wereunable to discern a significant difference between

the ethical attitudes of business and nonbusinessmajors. Of the 56 studies reviewed, Borkowski andUgras found only 6 reporting significant differ-ences in ethical attitudes between business andnonbusiness students; the majority found no sig-nificant differences or mixed results. Further, in astudy of nearly 600 undergraduates in New Zea-land, Tse and Au (1997) found no significant differ-ences in the ethical attitudes between businessand nonbusiness juniors and seniors. Further, arecent study by Lopez, Rechner, and Olson-Buchanan (2005) showed students who completedtheir undergraduate business degrees were lessapproving of unethical behavior than those begin-ning their degree (controlling for gender and age).

In spite of this inconsistent evidence, critics,such as Ghoshal (2005) and Mitroff (2004), call intoquestion the personal moral philosophies andprofit mentalities of business students, especiallyin comparison to their nonbusiness counterparts.If, as Ghoshal (2005) and Mitroff (2004) would argue,business training creates students with amoral,profit-centered attitudes, then we would expectbusiness students to be more relativistic, less ide-alistic, and more profit driven than nonbusinessstudents at similar points in their academic ca-reers. As a result, we offer the following hypothe-ses for empirical testing.Hypothesis 1: If the critics are right, then the per-

sonal moral philosophies of businessschool students will be differentfrom those of nonbusiness school stu-dents such that business school stu-dents will be (a) more relativistic,and (b) less idealistic than their non-business school counterparts.

Hypothesis 2: If the critics are right, then the profitattitudes of business school studentswill be different from those of non-business students such that the busi-ness school students will possessstronger profit attitudes than theirnonbusiness counterparts.

Self-Selection Bias

In his response to Ghoshal’s (2005) essay on thestate of business education, Pfeffer (2005) suggeststhe prior studies on the ethical decision making ofbusiness and economics students suffer from aserious limitation. By failing to control for otherpotential sources of variation, it is impossible toknow if the observed effects are the result of self-selection, or the educational and socialization pro-cesses found in business and economics training,notes Pfeffer. In other words, do students who

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choose business programs “come to the party” withpersonal moral philosophies and profit and sus-tainability attitudes consistent with businessschool education? Do freshmen business studentsalready possess amoral personal philosophies andprofit and sustainability attitudes consistent withthe amoral teachings of transaction-costs econom-ics and economic liberalism? Our next set of hy-potheses attempt to address Pfeffer’s (2005) ques-tion. Specifically, we test if the personal moralphilosophies or profit and sustainability attitudesof business school freshmen are different fromfreshman entering nonbusiness programs.Hypothesis 3: The personal moral philosophies of

business school freshmen will bedifferent from those of nonbusinessschool freshmen such that businessschool freshmen will be (a) morerelativistic and (b) less idealisticthan their nonbusiness schoolcounterparts.

Hypothesis 4: The profit attitudes of businessschool freshmen will be differentfrom those of nonbusiness freshmensuch the business school freshmenwill possess stronger profit attitudesthan their nonbusiness counter parts.

Business Freshmen Versus Business Seniors

One of the main criticisms of business education isthe belief that the process creates amoral manag-ers interested only in making money. If that isindeed the case, then the personal moral philoso-phies and profit mentalities of business school se-niors, who have been exposed to 3-plus years ofbusiness education, should be different from thoseof business freshmen, who have yet to take theirfirst business class. More specifically, if the criticsof business school education are right, then theidealism scores of business seniors should belower than those of business freshmen. Further, therelativism scores of business seniors should behigher, and business seniors’ sustainability scoresshould be lower, than those of their business fresh-man counterparts. If, as the critics suggest, busi-ness school education does have an impact on thepersonal moral philosophies and profit mentalityof students, then we should see some evidence ofthis impact on these scores. Our final set of hypoth-eses address this question by comparing the per-sonal moral philosophies and profits mentalities ofbusiness freshmen and business seniors.Hypothesis 5: If the critics are right, then the per-

sonal moral philosophies of businessschool seniors will be different from

those of business school freshmensuch that business school seniorswill be (a) more relativistic and (b)less idealistic than their nonbusi-ness school counterparts.

Hypothesis 6: If the critics are right, then the profitattitudes of business school seniorswill be different from those of busi-ness freshmen such that the businessschool seniors will possess strongerprofit attitudes than their freshmencounterparts.

METHODS

Sample and Data Collection

Participants were 1,080 undergraduate studentsfrom a major public research university. The sam-ple was culled from 37 sections of core businessand nonbusiness courses over the 2004–2005 aca-demic year. The intent was to survey business andnonbusiness majors from a wide spectrum of fresh-man-, sophomore-, junior- and senior-level bacca-laureate courses offered by the university. Stu-dents received extra credit in the course they weretaking for responding to the survey. While theamount of extra credit was left to the discretion ofthe instructors, most typically offered five extrapoints on a midterm exam. Students were told thesurvey was for research purposes and their in-structors would only receive a list of students com-pleting the survey; anonymity would be assured,and their responses would only be reported in theaggregate. The survey was administered on-lineusing a web-based survey. A web survey wasdeemed preferable because we wanted to be ableto ensure students the highest level of anonymitypossible to reduce the potential for receiving bi-ased answers. The survey took approximately 15minutes to complete. Because of students droppingclasses, incomplete data, and the potential overlapof the some students taking multiple sectionswithin the sampling domain, calculating a preciseresponse rate across all 37 sections was difficult.We were, however, able to calculate a responserate using a subset of the 37 sections targeted. Forthe 16 sections we were able to get informationabout, approximately 53% of the students re-sponded. We assume the other 21 sections experi-enced a similar response rate. Students who re-sponded to the survey more than once had one setof their responses randomly removed from thesample.

The sample included 1,080 respondents; 25 failedto report their class standing, while 4 did not report

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their major. Of those who reported their classstanding, there were 298 freshmen, 158 sopho-mores, 264 juniors, and 335 seniors. Six-hundredand forty were business students, and 436 reportedmajors in other areas. Males comprised 48% of thesample, and the average age of the respondentswas just under 21. Our data are cross-sectional. Wewere unable to randomly assign individuals todifferent treatments (e.g., business vs. nonbusinessclasses), nor were we able to track how the re-sponses of individuals change over time as theyreceived more business training. The best we cando is compare business to nonbusiness studentsand compare freshman to seniors and see if anydifferences exist. Finally, we cannot test the rela-tionship between students’ personal moral philos-ophies and profit and sustainability attitudes andtheir subsequent behaviors on the job. We are,however, only concerned with how business edu-cation influences their personal moral philoso-phies and profit and sustainability attitudes.

Measures

Personal Moral Philosophies

Forsyth’s (1980) Ethics Position Questionnaire wasused to measure students’ personal moral philos-ophies. We chose this scale for several reasons.First, because of numerous replications, the psy-chometric properties of this measure are wellknown (e.g., Henle, Giacalone, & Jurkiewicz, 2005),allowing our results to be compared to prior re-search. Prior studies have considered the validityand orthogonal nature of relativism and idealism.For example, Leary, Knight, and Barnes (1986)found the Machiavellianism scale was positivelyassociated with relativism, and negatively corre-lated with idealism. Further, Eastman, Eastman,and Tolson (2001), Forsyth and Pope (1984) andSinghapakdi, Kraft, Vitell, and Rallapalli (1995) allreport a lack of social desirability bias for themeasure. Further, prior researchers have foundpositive relationships between Forsyth’s measuresand behaviors (e.g., interpersonal and organiza-tional deviance; Henle, Giacalone, & Jurkiewicz,2005), a factor making this measure appropriateand interesting for the purposes for our study.Third, these scales seemed well suited to our datacollection device. Other methods, such as the eval-uation of ethical vignettes, would have taken toolong and would have reduced response rates sig-nificantly. Finally, and most importantly, the twodimensions of ethics tapped by these scales seemgermane to the discussion at hand. Consequently,we used Forsyth’s idealism and relativism mea-

sures to assess a student’s personal moral philos-ophy. Each item used a 7-point Likert-type scale.The average of the specific items, which are pre-sented in Appendix A, was calculated and used inour analyses.Profit Attitudes. Because no scale existed, wetapped students’ profit attitudes by developing twonew measures. Where applicable, the literaturewas used to guide the development of these items(e.g., Klassen, 2001). We constructed items to as-sess students’ attitudes toward sustainability, us-ing the World Commission on Economic Develop-ment’s (1987) definition of a sustainable businessas one meeting the economic, social, and environ-mental needs of the present without compromisingthe ability of future generations to meet their ownneeds. Items were written as unambiguously aspossible, avoiding the use of compound state-ments (Nunnally, 1978). Consistent with the urg-ings of Hinkin (1995), maintaining content validitywas our main concern while generating and se-lecting new items. There are two main criteria fordemonstrating content validity: the degree towhich each item represents the variable of interestand how well the set of items represents all as-pects of the construct’s domain. The use of fourknowledgeable raters enhanced content validity ofour sustainability items.

The first dimension, called Triple-Bottom Line(TBL), examines students’ attitudes about how anorganization’s performance should be judged andevaluated. This scale addresses the value studentsplace on expanding the conceptualization of firmperformance to explicitly include social and envi-ronmental indicators. A higher score on TBL indi-cates the respondent believes a company’s overallperformance should consider social and environ-mental dimensions. If the charges of critics leveledagainst business school education are correct,then we would expect business students to scorelower on this dimension than nonbusiness majors.Further, business seniors should score lower thanbusiness freshmen, as business education toutsprofits over all other measures of performance, in-cluding social and environmental indicators. Weused two items to measure TBL: (1) In the future,employee well-being should be seen as part of afirm’s “bottom line,” and (2) In the future, environ-mental protection should be seen as part of a firm’s“bottom line.” These two items were summed andthe total was divided by two. Coefficient alpha forthis scale was .76.

The second dimension, named Employment In-tent, examines a student’s attitudes regarding fu-ture employment and what values they believetheir employers should hold. Specifically, we

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asked students if they would consider a firm’s so-cial and environmental performance when consid-ering their employment options: Will they considerworking for a company that harms the environ-ment or is socially irresponsible? This dimensionaddresses what types of organizations studentswish to work for, and reflects the extent to whichstudents are willing to act on their beliefs. Higherscores indicate the respondent places a highervalue on a potential employer’s social and envi-ronmental performance. If, as critics suggest, busi-ness education is truly amoral and drives studentsto consider money at the expense of society andthe environment, then we would expect seniors inbusiness to have lower scores than business fresh-men on Employment Intent. If those students whocare more about social and environmental perfor-mance enter majors other than business, then wewould expect business majors to have lower scoreson Employment Intent than students in other ma-jors. Three items were used to measure Employ-ment Intent: (1) I will only consider working for acompany that values employee well-being at leastas much as profits, (2) I will only consider workingfor a company that has a clean environmentalrecord, and (3) I will only consider working for acompany that values the environment at least asmuch as profits. The average of these three itemswas calculated for each respondent. Coefficientalpha for this scale was .74.Demographic Variables. Consistent with previousresearch linking ethical beliefs to demographicvariables (Borkowski & Ugras, 1998; Lopez, Rech-ner, & Olson-Buchanan, 2005), we asked each re-spondent their gender, age, and class (freshman tosenior). However, age was highly correlated withclass (r � 0.50, p � .001), so it was dropped from theanalysis as class more closely mirrored the intentof the study (i.e., what is the relationship betweenexposure to business school education and per-sonal moral philosophies and profit and sustain-

ability attitudes?).The sequencing of coursework at the university

is typical of most universities. Thus, freshmen re-spondents would have taken few, if any, businesscourses. Sophomores would have taken some pre-business core classes, like Introduction to Econom-ics, and Principles of Accounting. Juniors wouldhave completed the prebusiness core classes andwould be enrolled in some lower level businessclasses, such as Principles of Marketing or Orga-nizational Behavior. Senior respondents wouldhave completed a good portion of their core classesand would have been taking upper-divisioncoursework, such as Strategic Management or Ad-vanced Corporate Finance. When choosing theclasses in our sampling frame, we seriously con-sidered prerequisites and the sequencing ofclasses. Thus, the higher the reported class stand-ing, the more business school training the respon-dents had received.

RESULTS

Table 1 presents the descriptive statistics, intercor-relations, and Cronbach’s alpha coefficients (whereappropriate) for all the variables in this study. Weused multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) totest our research questions.

First, we hypothesized the personal moral phi-losophies of business school students would bedifferent from those of nonbusiness school stu-dents such that business school students will bemore relativistic, less idealistic, and more profitmotivated than their nonbusiness school counter-parts. Results are found in Table 2. The overallMANOVA, controlling for gender and class, wasonce again significant (Wilks’ Lambda � .243, F �789.6, p � .001). Specifically, Hypothesis 1 was notsupported as business and nonbusiness studentsdid not differ on the idealism and relativismscales. Significant differences were found in our

TABLE 1Means, Standard Deviations, Coefficient Alphas and Correlations

M SD Alpha 1 2 3 4 5 6

1 Idealism 4.79 0.88 0.792 Relativism 4.27 0.88 0.73 0.10**3 Triple-Bottom Line 4.65 1.43 0.76 0.21** �0.034 Employment Intent 4.69 1.56 0.74 0.48** 0.08* 0.29**5 Class 2.96 1.21 N/A �0.01 �0.10** 0.26** 0.07*6 Age 21.76 3.92 N/A 0.01 �0.09** 0.25 0.11** 0.50**7 Gender 1.52 .5 N/A 0.28** 0.09** 0.01 0.25** �0.02 �0.03

Items 1 through 6 have scales ranges from 1 to 7.* p � .05. ** p � .01, two-tailed Pearson Correlations.N � 1,080.

16 MarchAcademy of Management Learning & Education

measures of attitudes about sustainability, par-tially supporting Hypothesis 2. Specifically, busi-ness majors were different from nonbusiness ma-jors in their attitudes about Employment Intent(F � 5.04, p � .05).

Our study’s next two hypotheses attempted toaddress the self-selection question raised by Pfef-fer (2005): Do business freshman possess moreamoral personal philosophies and stronger profitmentalities before entering their degree programsthan their nonbusiness counterparts? Results forthis test are found in Table 3. The overallMANOVA, controlling for gender, was significant(Wilks’ Lambda � .139, F � 282.8, p � .001). Busi-ness freshmen, however, did not differ from non-business freshmen in terms of idealism or relativ-ism. Hypotheses 3a and 3b were not supported, norwas Hypothesis 4, as these two groups of studentsdid not differ on TBL or Employment Intent.

Hypotheses 5 and 6 compared the personalmoral philosophies and profit mentalities of busi-ness school freshmen and seniors. In particular,Hypothesis 5 suggested the personal moral philos-ophies of business school seniors would be morerelativistic and less idealistic than their freshmencounterparts, while Hypothesis 6 posited businessschool seniors would hold stronger profit attitudesthan freshmen. The overall MANOVA was signifi-cant (Wilks’ Lambda � .149, F � 359.0, p � .001). Theresults in Table 4, again, showed no significantdifferences in idealism or relativism between busi-ness freshmen and business seniors. Thus, Hypoth-

eses 5a and 5b were not supported. Significantdifferences, however, were found for both mea-sures of attitudes of profit and sustainability: Tri-ple-Bottom Line (F � 45.45, p � .001), and Employ-ment Intent (F � 7.73, p � .01) as seniors scoredhigher on TBL, and Employment Intent. The direc-tions of these relationships, however, were oppo-site to what critics, such as Ghoshal (2005) andMitroff (2004), would have hypothesized, as busi-ness seniors were more likely to believe (a) thatbusinesses should be judged on social and envi-ronmental performance, and (b) that businesseswith positive social and environmental perfor-mances are more attractive employers.

DISCUSSION

The goal of this research project was to shed lighton the heated debate about the relationships be-tween business school education and the personalmoral philosophies and the profit attitudes of busi-ness students. The charges about the appropriate-ness of business school education launched bymany well-respected critics, such as Ghoshal(2005), Mitroff (2004), and Pfeffer (2005), are indeedthought provoking and have clearly captured theattention of academics and practitioners alike.These charges include calls for the mobilization ofeffort to scrap the theoretical foundations of busi-ness school education. For example, within thisjournal alone, dozens of articles have citedGhoshal’s 2005 piece, many of them highlightingthe shortcomings of business education. Ourstudy was motivated by the strength of thesecharges. Given the seriousness of the criticisms,we felt it was important to determine if they weremerited.

It is easy, and convenient, to witness the inci-dents at Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom and concludebusiness school education is broken and amoral.While we support the notion that one ethical scan-dal in business is one too many, we also believe

TABLE 2Means of Business and Nonbusiness

DependentVariable

Businessn � 603

Nonbusinessn � 413 F Sig.

Idealism 4.78 4.83 .077 .782Relativism 4.28 4.34 .064 .800Triple-Bottom Line 4.64 4.64 1.043 .307Employment Intent 4.60 4.85 5.044 .025*

Error df � 1,012.

TABLE 3Means of Business and Nonbusiness Freshmen

DependentVariable

BusinessFreshmen

n � 147

NonbusinessFreshmen

n � 136 F Sig.

Idealism 4.75 4.86 .015 .903Relativism 4.36 4.50 .667 .415Triple-Bottom Line 4.14 4.26 .695 .405Employment Intent 4.42 4.76 3.046 .082

Error df � 280.

TABLE 4Means of Business Freshman and Business

Seniors

DependentVariable

BusinessFreshmen

n � 147

BusinessSeniorsn � 216 F Sig.

Idealism 4.75 4.78 .007 .933Relativism 4.36 4.24 1.1977 .161Triple-Bottom Line 4.14 5.12 44.003 .001***Employment Intent 4.42 4.76 7.507 .006**

Error df � 360.

2009 17Neubaum, Pagell, Drexler, McKee-Ryan, and Larson

that before reforms are launched, empirical evi-dence of the nature and seriousness of the prob-lems must first be gathered. Critics of businesseducation point to the tragedies at Enron, and ahandful of other conspicuous examples, and arguethese incidents are condemning evidence that jus-tifies the need for widespread reform of businessschool education. Rather than leap to conclusionsand join the fray, our goal here was to take a stepback and examine the assumptions being made.By collecting a large sample of data from a widevariety of business and nonbusiness students, wetook snapshots of university students who havebeen exposed to different levels of business andnonbusiness education. These snapshots helpedus identify patterns between business school edu-cation and the personal moral philosophies andprofit and sustainability attitudes of students. Be-fore suggesting the process should be changed, orscrapping the well-established theoretical under-pinnings of business schools, we felt it was impor-tant to determine if, in fact, there was strong evi-dence to support such an effort. As suggested bythe discussion below, we did not find enough evi-dence to justify these actions.

Business Versus Nonbusiness Students

Hypotheses 1 and 2 compared the moral philoso-phies and profit and sustainability attitudes ofbusiness students and nonbusiness students,while controlling for class standing and gender.The two groups did not differ on either of the per-sonal moral philosophy measures; thus Hypothe-ses 1a and 1b were not supported. These findingsare, in fact, consistent with those of Borkowski andUgras (1998) and Tse and Au (1997), who were un-able to identify consistent significant differencesin university students’ ethical attitudes across ma-jors. Further, we found no evidence suggesting theeconomic models and frameworks of traditionalbusiness school training were related to the per-sonal moral philosophies of business students.

Hypothesis 2, which compared business andnonbusiness students’ attitudes about profits andsustainability, was partially supported, as non-business majors were more likely to report theywill take into account a firm’s environmental andsocial performance when searching for employ-ment. This finding does provide some support, al-beit tentative, of the concerns expressed by Mitroff(2004) and others. When it came to a matter ofpersonal choice, nonbusiness students were morelikely to report they would “vote with their feet”and prefer working for companies with strongersocial and environmental records. Thus, in terms of

making a personal choice about their careers,business students appeared to be more concernedabout their own welfare than the welfare of theenvironment or of others. Nonbusiness students,however, reported they were more likely to con-sider an employers’ social and economic recordwhen making career choices. Also of interest isthat although business and nonbusiness studentsdid not differ in terms of their beliefs, they diddiffer in terms of how they would act upon thosebeliefs. Thus, although the students did not differin their views on how business performanceshould be judged and measured, nonbusiness stu-dents were more likely to agree they would usethis calculus when making a decision about theirfuture employers.

Self-Selection in Business Schools

To test whether amoral or profits-focused studentsself-select into business degree programs, we pro-posed freshmen business students would be morerelativistic and less idealistic than nonbusinessfreshmen, and freshmen business students wouldhave stronger profit and sustainability attitudesthan their nonbusiness counterparts. Based on theresults reported here, there is no evidence busi-ness freshmen were any different from nonbusi-ness freshmen as business students’ scores on rel-ativism and idealism mirrored those of theirnonbusiness counterparts, as did their scores onour measures of profit and sustainability attitudes.These findings, therefore, reject Pfeffer’s (2005) con-tention that self-selection might play a role in theamorality of business students or managers. Thepersonal moral philosophies and profit attitudes offreshmen appear to be consistent, regardless ofmajor, which refutes the notion business freshmenare somehow preordained to possess amoral per-sonal philosophies or strong profit attitudes.

Thus, we did not find any support for the ideathat incoming freshmen students interested inbusiness are any more or less ethical, nor are theyany more or less “money hungry” than their non-business counterparts. So, before they are exposedto business curriculum, freshmen business stu-dents appear to be very similar to other freshmenthroughout the campus. The “raw materials” (i.e.,freshmen) business schools receive appear to bethe same as those received by other collegesacross campus.

Business Freshman Versus Business Seniors

Hypotheses 5 and 6 compared business freshmento business seniors, and considered whether expo-

18 MarchAcademy of Management Learning & Education

sure to business school curriculum was associatedwith the personal moral philosophies and profitand sustainability attitudes of business studentsat different places in their academic careers. Re-garding Hypothesis 5, there were no significantdifferences between freshmen and seniors in theirpersonal moral philosophies: Both groups werecomparable in terms of idealism and relativism.Thus, the personal moral philosophies of out-goingbusiness seniors, who have been widely exposedto supposedly amoral and overly economic theo-retical frameworks, are no different from the per-sonal moral philosophies of incoming freshmen.We found no evidence suggesting the values andframeworks individuals use to make ethical deci-sions change as a result of business school educa-tion. While our methodology does not allow us tomake causal attributions, we find no support forthe notion of the deleterious effect of businessschool training on the personal moral philosophiesof students. If critics are right, then surely wewould have found differences in the personalmoral philosophies of freshman business studentsand senior business students: We did not. Thus, interms of personal moral philosophies, the “rawmaterials” and the “end products” of businessschools are, indeed, not statistically different.

There were, however, significant differences be-tween business freshmen and business seniors onboth measures of profit and sustainability atti-tudes. The significant differences, however, werein the opposite direction from what critics of busi-ness schools, such as Ghoshal (2005) and Mitroff(2004) would have predicted. Specifically, seniorbusiness majors were more likely to believe (a)considering environmental and social indicatorsas a part of a firm’s performance is the right thingto do, and (b) they will take a firm’s environmentaland social performance into account when seekingemployment. Thus, those students with 3 or 4 moreyears of business school education were morelikely to agree that businesses’ performanceshould include more than just economic dimen-sions. They also reported being more likely toconsider businesses’ social and environmentalperformance when considering their employmentoptions. Thus, while the ethical beliefs of busi-ness freshmen and business seniors did not dif-fer, business seniors reported they were morelikely to act on their beliefs. This is, indeed, amost encouraging result, one that critics wouldnot have predicted.

In Table 5, we present the means of business andnonbusiness students at all four points in theircollege careers for all of the study’s measures.When examined as a whole, the evidence points

toward business students traveling a path similarto nonbusiness students, as scores on nearly allthe items move together. Yet, this path heads in theopposite direction from the one posited by the crit-ics of business education. While it is impossible toattribute these differences to changes created by abusiness education—or to rule them out—we cansay the findings reported here are quite differentfrom what Ghoshal (2005) and others might havebelieved.

Limitations

This study was stimulated by assertions that busi-ness schools teach amoral values or that, alterna-tively, they ought to do more by way of teachingethical values and behaviors. Given the signifi-cance of these assertions and the lack of empiricalsupport for them, we thought it important to ex-plore these issues empirically. As with other stud-ies, ours suffers from methodological limitations.

First, we used a cross-sectional design. We didnot have longitudinal data to allow us to trackchanges in the personal moral philosophies of thesame individual over time. Survey respondentswere not randomly assigned to experimental con-ditions, thus further affecting the internal validityof this study. Given the nature of higher educationcurricula (i.e., students taking various courses fromvarious instructors), it would be impossible to exertany reasonable level of experimental control in

TABLE 5Means by Class for Business and Nonbusiness

Majors

Variable ClassBusinessMajors

NonbusinessMajors Total

Idealism Freshmen 4.751 4.864 4.805Sophomores 4.665 4.782 4.720Juniors 4.735 4.817 4.765Seniors 4.782 4.827 4.798Total 4.746 4.829 4.780

Relativism Freshmen 4.365 4.500 4.430Sophomores 4.344 4.309 4.327Juniors 4.216 4.305 4.350Seniors 4.240 4.190 4.223Total 4.278 4.338 4.303

Triple-Bottom Line Freshmen 4.136 4.261 4.196Sophomores 4.311 4.466 4.384Juniors 4.630 4.731 4.667Seniors 5.120 5.137 5.126Total 4.642 4.460 4.641

Employment Intent Freshmen 4.418 4.759 4.582Sophomores 4.423 5.018 4.703Juniors 4.648 4.883 4.734Seniors 4.756 4.836 4.784Total 4.600 4.853 4.703

2009 19Neubaum, Pagell, Drexler, McKee-Ryan, and Larson

such evaluation studies. A truly conclusive studywould track a large cohort of students from multi-ple majors studying at multiple universitiesthroughout their 4 years in college. No study, to ourknowledge, has taken this approach. Given theseriousness of the charges and the importance ofthis debate, such research seems vital and ever-more necessary, given our results.

Second, we used only one of many ways to con-ceptualize and measure ethical values and couldnot measure actual behaviors or ethical decisionsmade by graduates when faced with ethical dilem-mas. Instead, we only measured personal moralphilosophies and attitudes about profits and sus-tainability. While moral philosophies should in-form ethical choices and have been shown to berelated to ethical actions, decisions and behaviors(e.g., Barnett, Bass, & Brown, 1994; Henle, Giaca-lone, & Jurkiewicz, 2005), it is possible our resultswould have been different had we been able torelate these measures to concurrent behaviors, orto have predicted future behaviors or choices.

Third, our study focused exclusively on under-graduate students. In his criticism of business ed-ucation, Pfeffer (2005) cites evidence of unethicalbehaviors demonstrated by MBA students (e.g.,Williams, Barrett, & Brabston, 2000). Future re-searchers might consider replicating our study us-ing MBA or EMBA students. It is very possible thereare significant self-selection issues for those whopursue graduate education in business—differ-ences future researchers should examine.

Fourth, our data come from a single university.Any number of university- or location-specific fac-tors could explain our results. Future researchersneed to replicate our work using samples fromother universities to determine if its findings gen-eralize across multiple settings.

Finally, our study does not address the issue ofwhy managers make seemingly unethical choices.Graduates of business schools bring various be-liefs and attitudes with them to the workplace andface a wide range of organizational experiencesthroughout their careers. Organizational culturesor climates might establish expectations for man-agers that are inconsistent with their values andthus might elicit behaviors that are different fromthose graduates value. The individuals who themedia depict as making unethical choices are farremoved from school; our study does not have thefidelity to understand why these executives madethe choices they did. Perhaps the ethical lapses ofmanagers within the corporate world have more todo with their professional experiences and less todo with their business training. Nevertheless, we,as educators, should not simply wash our hands of

this matter. In the paragraphs below, we discussthe implications of our research.

Implications

Based on our results, we offer several implicationsfor educators and future researchers. While itmight be appealing to blame business school andbusiness school educators for the seemingly wide-spread corruption and ethical scandals present incorporate America today, such a provocative argu-ment is not only unsubstantiated by empirical ev-idence, but also too convenient and overly simplis-tic. Our intent here is not to suggest that ethicaltraining in business schools is unimportant.Rather, we believe the results of our study showthat blaming business theories for the amorality ofmanagers might be misplaced, and we fear itmight actually misdirect the attention of educatorstruly wishing to improve the consciousness of cor-porate America.

Further, the issues under discussion are not justof interest for academic debate. These discussionsare influencing curriculum decisions as the deliv-ery of ethics instruction has been identified as anaccreditation standard by the Association for theAdvancement of Collegiate Schools of Business(2006). In addition, recent ethical lapses have givenrise to regulatory initiatives, such as the Sarbanes–Oxley Act, intended to quell unethical corporatefinancial reporting (Rockness & Rockness, 2005).Although perfect research would be driven by the-ory and be able to provide the reader with answersto what is going on and why, we believe it isimperative to have more confidence about whatmight be happening in the classroom, and to busi-ness students, before making decisions on curric-ula or regulations.

Encouraging business schools to discard theirfundamental theories in an effort to improve themorality of students seems an overly zealous ap-proach. Before introducing curriculum reform, webelieve business schools need to develop a muchfuller picture of why their students—the futuremanager’s of the world—make unethical deci-sions. Research in the ethics literature shows thatindividuals’ morality evolves over time; that, onaverage, most individuals become more morallydeveloped as they age; and that women are moremorally developed than men (e.g., Rest, 1994). Butthe effects of age and gender pale in comparison tothe strength of college education, which has beenshown to account for over 250 times the varianceexplained by gender (Thoma, 1986). Thus, collegeeducation has been shown to be a powerful expe-rience in the moral development for all students,

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including those from the business school (McNeel,1994). To suggest that business school educationharms the morality of its students simply ignoresthe reality of prior empirical research. Furtherweakening the claim of critics is the string of stud-ies that have demonstrated, in general, that busi-ness practitioners are more ethical than businessstudents (see Singhapakdi & Marta 2005; and Co-hen, Pant, & Sharp, 2001 for examples). Thus, busi-ness school education does not appear to lay themoral groundwork for the justification of futureethical transgressions.

We also know that ethics can be taught, and thateducational programs that integrate the study ofethical theory with its practical application can behighly effective (Rest, Narvaez, Bebeau, & Thoma,1999; Rynes, Trank, Lawson, & Ilies, 2003). Businessschools everywhere, therefore, should take everystep necessary to ensure they are fulfilling theirresponsibility to their students and the public.Thus, until business schools have universallyadopted such a means of teaching business ethics,we think it is premature to blame the inadequaciesof their theoretical tenets.

Thankfully, our findings reject the idea that astudent’s business orientation somehow preor-dains them to commit ethical violations. Whilebusiness scandals appear all too frequently, un-ethical practices, and unethical individuals,abound in a wide variety of arenas, includingsports, politics, and even university administra-tion. Countless baseball players and cyclists havebeen charged with taking steroids or other perfor-mance-enhancing drugs. House Minority LeaderTom DeLay has been indicted for fraud. Oral Rob-erts University President Richard Roberts wasforced to step down due to charges of misspending.Would critics such as Ghoshal (2005), Mitroff (2004),or Pfeffer (2005) blame the undergraduate educa-tion of these and other unethical individuals fortheir ethical transgressions? By arguing businessschool students or business school education areamoral, critics such as Ghoshal (2005) and Mitroff(2004) implicitly assume other colleges and disci-plines across campus do a much better job ofteaching ethics to their students, and that businessleaders of today are more amoral than their coun-terparts in other sectors. Yet, evidence suggeststhat ethical scandals cut across all walks of life.That does not mean business school educatorsshould shirk their responsibilities to teach andtrain their students to make sound and ethicalbusiness decisions. Instead, we believe that per-haps some of the criticism is unfair and unsup-ported by empirical evidence.

As suggested in our introduction, educators

would like to believe their teachings have a sig-nificant and positive effect on the beliefs and ac-tions of their students. That is, afterall, the intent ofeducation. While we did not find any evidence of anegative effect of business education on businessstudents’ personal moral philosophies, we did not,unfortunately, find a positive influence either. Nordid we find differences in the personal moral phi-losophies between freshman and senior nonbusi-ness majors. Perhaps this is due to the fact ourstudy focused exclusively on college students. Col-lege students might be more idealistic and lessrelativistic than noncollege students. It might bethat their prior educational experiences in collegepreparatory classes shaped their personal moralphilosophies in a significant way, leaving littleopportunity for studies in college to shape themfurther. Further, the university experience itself(e.g., living independently for the first time, shar-ing quarters with dozens of other students in adormitory setting, or forming new relationshipswith students and faculty from a diverse set ofbackgrounds) might have a profound and immedi-ate impact on incoming students’ personal moralphilosophies as they become part of a larger com-munity. While the college experience has beenshown to have a significant impact on students’moral development (McNeel, 1994), the influence ofany class or curriculum might be relatively smallin comparison to the wealth of other exposures.

One point of concern from our study was thefinding that nonbusiness students were morelikely to report they would act on their profits andsustainability attitudes when seeking employ-ment. Based on this result, we would encouragefuture researchers to focus less on measuring thebeliefs of business students, and suggest they de-sign research studies which somehow capture stu-dents’ actions and behaviors, or their intentions toact. Perhaps prior studies, which have tended tofocus on ethical attitudes, have missed the pointentirely. In the same vein, educators might con-sider spending less time on teaching business stu-dents ethical frameworks and focus more heavilyon asking students “what would you do?” Askingstudents to analyze a case or an ethical scenariofrom the perspective of an outsider is one thing;having them think about how they would act, andhaving them develop a rationale for their own in-tentions quite another.

As individuals, one area we can influence is theresearch we do and the ways it is disseminated.Ghosal (2005) and Mitroff (2004) were both veryclear the problem with business schools goesdeeper than what happens in the classroom. Wewould posit our research, and its dissemination,

2009 21Neubaum, Pagell, Drexler, McKee-Ryan, and Larson

informs the apparent societal belief businessesput profits above all else. Implicitly or explicitly,the dependant variable in almost all business re-search is ultimately profits. This may be best evi-denced by the work in sustainability or corporatesocial responsibility asking questions such as“does it pay to be green”? What is left unstated inthis type of research is profits are still generallythe ultimate arbiter of success. We echo many oth-ers by noting as long as we (and in this case it ispersonal—we have done this type of research) con-tinue to do research in this fashion, write textbooksand teach based on this research, and in generalcommunicate with the public in this manner, noth-ing will fundamentally change. Change, then, hasto start with us and the ways in which we measureorganizational success in the research we do. Ourteaching also has to reflect a more multifacetedmeasure of business success than profits. Perhapsmost important, we need to work to change theway we measure organizational success in ourown research and to be willing to help place stu-dents not at the employer who pays the most, butrather the employer who provides the best chanceof providing the student both a living and a mean-ingful work life.

APPENDIX

(1 � strongly disagree; 7 � strongly agree)

Relativism Items

• A person should make certain that their actionsnever intentionally harm another, even to asmall degree.

• Risks to another should never be tolerated, ir-respective of how small the risks might be.

• The existence of potential harm to others isalways wrong, irrespective of the benefits to begained.

• One should never psychologically or physi-cally harm another person.

• One should not perform an action which mightin any way threaten the dignity and welfare ofanother individual.

• If an action could harm an innocent other, thenit should not be done.

• Deciding whether or not to perform an act bybalancing the positive consequences of the actagainst the negative consequences of the act isimmoral.

• The dignity and welfare of people should bethe most important concern in any society.

• It is never necessary to sacrifice the welfare ofothers.

Idealism Items

• Moral actions are those that closely match ide-als of the most “perfect” action.

• There are no ethical principles that are so im-portant that they should be a part of any codeof ethics.

• What is ethical varies from one situation andsociety to another.

• Moral standards should be seen as being indi-vidualistic; what one person considers to bemoral may be judged to be immoral by anotherperson.

• Different types of moralities cannot be com-pared as to “rightness.”

• Questions of what is ethical for everyone cannever be resolved since what is moral or im-moral is up to the individual.

• Moral standards are simply personal rules thatindicate how a person should behave, andare not to be applied in making judgments ofothers.

• Ethical considerations in interpersonal rela-tions are so complex that individuals should beallowed to formulate their own individualcodes.

• Rigidly codifying an ethical position that pre-vents certain types of actions could standin the way of better human relations andadjustment.

• No rule concerning lying can be formulated;whether a lie is permissible or not “permissi-ble” totally depends upon the situation.

• Whether a lie is judged to be moral or immoraldepends upon the circumstances surroundingthe action.

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Donald O. Neubaum (PhD, strategic management, Georgia State University) is an assistantprofessor of strategy and entrepreneurship in the College of Business at Oregon State Uni-versity. Neubaum’s research interests include corporate governance, corporate social respon-sibility, social entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship. Don.Neubaum@bus.oregonstate.edu.

Mark Pagell (PhD, Michigan State University) is an associate professor of operations man-agement and information systems at the Schulich School of Business at York University.Pagell’s current research involves sustainable supply-chain management, the role of em-ployee safety in operational environments, and operational responses to environmentaluncertainty. mpagell@schulich.yorku.ca.

John A. Drexler, Jr. (PhD, organizational psychology, University of Michigan) is associate deanfor faculty and associate professor in the College of Business at Oregon State University.Drexler’s primary research is in facets of creating and measuring organization change.Jack.Drexler@bus.oregonstate.edu.

Frances M. McKee-Ryan (PhD, organizational behavior, Arizona State University) is an assis-tant professor of management at the University of Nevada, Reno. McKee-Ryan’s researchinterests include employee attitudes and organizational performance, as well as underem-ployment and coping with job loss. fmryan@unr.edu.

Erik Larson (PhD, organizational behavior, SUNY–Buffalo) is a professor of management in theCollege of Business at Oregon State University. Larson’s research interests include projectmanagement, product development, and agile methodologies. He is currently working onthe 5th edition of his text Project Management—The Managerial Process. Erik.Larson@bus.oregonstate.edu.

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