While teaching the MBA Oath (Nohria & Khurana, 2008), I mentioned Prof. Nitin Nohria, the first Asian Dean of the Harvard Business School, as one of the pioneers of teaching business ethics and discussed what MBA Oath refers to, why it should be administered, and how could create ethical conduct in leaders and managers. Many of the students were not convinced. One of the reason could be due to the composition of the class (nearly 85-90 percent of the students have engineering background); they mostly believe that the crux of scientific causality is (traditional) positivism and many aspects of ethics are based on anti-positivist and constructionism paradigms. Hence, when it comes to business ethics, most of my students are of the opinion that it does not deserve a space in the management science curricula nor in manager practitioners’ field.In the middle of the classroom discussion, one of the students quipped, “How can he [Prof. Nohria] talk about ethics [MBA oath], when he himself is unethical?” I asked, “How?” He replied, “He [Prof. Nohria] was behind the unceremonious and immoral sacking of [Mr.] Cyrus Mistry!” I asked, “Are you sure [that] Mr. Mistry was the right person to lead the Group and its values?” He said, “Yes.” In the meanwhile, he was trying to garner support from other students in the class by sending them (sic) news clippings through WhatsApp messages about your (alleged) role in Mr. Mistry’s sacking. “Hmm!” I pondered.
Nowadays, for obvious reasons, I do not argue with people beyond a certain point, including students, about the importance of business ethics for the survival of the humankind. I just speak about its importance, and let them make (informed) decision. Never mind! Let me take you back to the incident I was narrating. After thinking about the student’s point for some time, I extensively referred to Khurana and Nohria (2008), Ajzen (1985), Zimbardo (2007), and Kotter (1995) to drive home the point as to why the MBA Oath is an important first step toward creating ethical conduct in the workplace.
For example, I discussed the Oath as a voluntary pledge for graduating MBAs and current MBAs to “create value responsibly and ethically.”1 The MBA Oath is akin the Hippocrates Oath taken by the medical students on passing out, which is important to make MBA a true profession and MBA-holders true professionals (Khurana & Nohria, 2008). It has additional advantages too. In the face of the impending influence of external factors like workgroups on behaviour in workplaces, taking the MBA Oath will continuously remind the manager about her/his promise (in the past during graduating) to uphold the sanctity of business and society. Citing Ajzen’s (1985) theory of planned behaviour, I discussed that the influence of cooperating others is one of the most important non-motivational factors that influence ethical behaviour. However, in the current business world, one can hardly get ethical ecosystem owing to the prevalence of the agents rooted in the neoclassical paradigm.2 Zimbardo (2007) describes the spiralling unethical behaviours at the workplace as the outcome of the “Lucifer effect”3 (i.e., the influence of the evil on the otherwise sane person). Thereafter, I appreciated their apathy toward business ethics as normal considering that ethical conducts are mostly not rewarded, neither in society not in business. In this regard, on the one hand, I referred to Kotter (1995, p. 63) who in the organizational change management context argues that “[e]mployees will not make sacrifices [say behaving ethically], even if they are unhappy with the status quo, unless they believe that useful change is possible [through ethical behaviours].” Thus, I acknowledged that they do not care about ethical conduct because there is hardly any incentive to do so. On the other hand, I shared with them the findings of the CEO survey by UN Global Compact and Accenture Strategy (2016) that revealed that the top leadership worldwide deemed social responsibility of business as the new means to create competitive advantage for companies in the current world. Hence, I attempted to make the students’ aware about how impoverished their worldview was. And finally, I narrated an analogy to tell them why one must heed to (great) concepts even if we disapprove the persons who have created them.
Here is the analogy. I asked, “How many of you have read/watched the Ramayana?” Almost all the hands went up. Then, I queried, “Do you agree with its teachings?” “Come on professor, yes we do; it’s a sacred text after all,” they said. “Who’s written it?” I inquired. “Valmiki,” they answered. “Who was he?” I asked again. “A poet and writer,” one of them said. “Is that all?” I asked. They paused a while and one of them answered, “He was also known as Dashyu Ratnakar,4 a dacoit and a murderer.” Thereafter, I concluded the importance of the MBA Oath in the following manner, “If you can believe in the sacredness of the Ramayana even when it is written by a poet who was a murderer, why cannot you accept Khurana and Nohria’s (2008) MBA Oath, fully knowing that they are some of the intellectuals par excellence in the field of management? Is a great idea time-space-consciousness bound?” There was a stoic silence in the classroom!
Thus, at least within me, arises a question. How could I inculcate the importance of business ethics into tomorrow’s leaders and managers who mostly are just fixated onto who is saying what, rather than what is being told? It is akin to killing a good message in the name of a bad messenger!
Endnotes:
1 See more on the MBA Oath at the following link: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/corporate-dossier/nitin-nohrias-idea-of-mba-oath-gathers-steam/articleshow/6262134.cms
2 Neoclassical paradigm broadly describes people as self-interest oriented, utility maximising hedonists.
3 Lucifer was once an angel who was revered as the carrier of light. He fell from grace because he refused to recognise that of God which was in His creation Adam. He was banished to Hell and became the embodiment of the evil. It is said that Lucifer the devil incites evil in humans through the temptation to do bad things.
4 Valmiki is the author of Ramayana, the first Hindu epic poem. Before becoming sagacious, he was named Ratnakar, a dacoit (dashyu in Sanskrit) and murderer. Once, he tried to attack a saint who asked him why he looted and murdered people. He replied that he needed to support himself and his family. The saint enquired if his family members would share the bad karma that he was acquiring in the process. He went home and asked his family whether they would share his bad karma; all of his family members denied. In the aftermath, he renounced everything and transformed from Dashyu Ratnakar to Sage Valmiki.
References:
Ajzen, I. (1985). From intentions to actions: A theory of planned behavior. In J. Kuhl & J. Beckman (Eds.), Action control: From cognition to behavior (pp. 11-39). Heidelberg, Germany: Springer.
Khurana, R., & Nohria, N. (2008). It’s time to make management a true profession. Harvard Business Review, 86, 70-77.
Kotter, J. P. (1995). Leading change: Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 73, 59-67.
UN Global Compact & Accenture Strategy (2016). The UN Global Compact—Accenture Strategy CEO study: Agenda 2030: A window of opportunity. https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-un-global-compact-ceo-study Accessed 17 September 2017.
Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York, NY: Random House Publishing.
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