Apathy toward business ethics! Are we confused between the message and the messenger?

Apathy toward business ethics! Are we confused between the message and the messenger?

“Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do.” — Potter Stewart (Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving from 1958 to 1981)

While teaching the MBA Oath¹ (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 referred, why it should be administered, and how to create ethical conduct in leaders and managers. Many of the students were not convinced. One of the reason could be 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) positivism² and many aspects of ethics are based on antipositivism³ and/or constructionism⁴ 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?”⁵ 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 Prof. Nohria’s (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) decisions. 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.” The MBA Oath is akin to 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.⁶ Zimbardo (2007) describes the spiralling unethical behaviours at the workplace as the outcome of the “Lucifer effect”⁷ (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 s/he disapproves the persons who have created them.

     Here is the analogy. I asked, “How many of you have read/watched the Ramayana⁸?” Almost all the hands went up. Then, I queried, “Do you agree with its teachings?” “Come on professor, yes we do; it is a sacred text, after all,” they said. “Who’s written it?” I inquired. “Valmiki,”⁹ they answered. “Who was he?” I asked again. “A poet and writer,” one of them said. “Is that all?” I asked. They paused for a while and one of them answered, “He was also known as Dashyu Ratnakar, 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 and get wisdom from it even knowing that it is written by a poet who was once a dacoit and murderer, why cannot you accept that MBA Oath can instill ethical conduct into the workplace. Moreover, the latter is authored by two of the finest management gurus of our time? Is a great idea time-space-consciousness(person) specific?” In the aftermath, there was a stoic silence in the classroom!

     Thus, at least within me, arises a question. How could I inculcate business ethics into tomorrow’s leaders and managers who mostly are just fixated onto who is saying, rather what is being said? Isn’t it tantamount to killing a good message in the name of a bad messenger?

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Endnotes:

¹ See more on the MBA Oath and its growing popularity at the following link: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/corporate-dossier/nitin-nohrias-idea-of-mba-oath-gathers-steam/articleshow/6262134.cms

² Positivism is a philosophical system that refers to scientific endeavour as analysing the sensory data about a phenomenon; it rejects metaphysics and theism.

³ Antipositivism rejects positivism and emphasizes on people and their cultural values as relevant factors to analyse a phenomenon.

⁴ Constructionism rejects that reality is given but constructed taking into account how social phenomena or objects of consciousness evolve in social contexts.

⁵ For a preliminary analysis of Mr. Cyrus Mistry’s ouster, see the following link: https://www.ft.com/content/5ef887ba-9c41-11e6-a6e4-8b8e77dd083a

⁶ Neoclassical paradigm broadly describes people as self-interest oriented, utility maximizing hedonists.

⁷ Lucifer was once an angel who was revered as the carrier of light. He fell from grace because he refused to recognize 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.

⁸ The Ramayana is an epic spiritual poem popular in South and Southeast Asia.

⁹ 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 inquired 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.

Financial Times (2016). Tata and Cyrus Mistry go toe to toe over his dismissal. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/5ef887ba-9c41-11e6-a6e4-8b8e77dd083a

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.

The Economic Times (2010).Nitin Nohria's idea of MBA oath gathers steam. Retrieved from https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/corporate-dossier/nitin-nohrias-idea-of-mba-oath-gathers-steam/articleshow/6262134.cms

UN Global Compact & Accenture Strategy (2016). The UN Global Compact—Accenture Strategy CEO study: Agenda 2030: A window of opportunity. Retrieved from https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insight-un-global-compact-ceo-study 

Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer effect: Understanding how good people turn evil. New York, NY: Random House Publishing.