business ethics unit IV essay and DQ Question

Managerial and Other White-Collar

Employees’ Perceptions of Ethical

Issues in Their Workplaces Sally J. Power

Lorman L. Lundsten

ABSTRACT. Understanding what types of issues

working adults perceive as ethical in their workplaces will

allow better teaching of business ethics. This study reports

findings of a thematic analysis of 764 ethical challenges

described by working adults in a part-time MBA program

and combines its findings with the other published studies

on perceptions of ethical issues in the workplace. The

results indicate that most people are assured about what

they describe as ethical transgressions although experts

might disagree. It also highlights certain issues and con-

texts as being more frequently perceived than others.

Ideas for future research in this area are also explored.

KEY WORDS: Ethical decision making, ethical per-

ceptions, moral intensity, part-time MBA students

Much social science research in business ethics has

focused on ethical attitudes. In most of these studies

subjects are asked directly about ethical issues or are

presented with vignettes and asked questions about

them (see Collins, 2000; Ford and Richardson,

1994; Loe et al., 2000 for reviews). In these studies

the ethical issues are specified by experts, not by the

respondents themselves. Relatively few studies have

focused directly on what ethical issues people actu-

ally perceive in their working lives.

We believe studying what people perceive as

ethical issues in their work warrants attention for

three reasons. First, a better understanding of what

people experience as ethical in the workplace can

better direct our teaching efforts. Adult education

theory has long held that it is important to know and

honor what adults already know about their subject.

In his classic book, The Adult Learner (1973),

Knowles wrote that it is important to respect and use

the experiences of adults because their experiences

are who they are and motivate their more ‘‘problem

centered’’ approach to learning (pp. 46–48).

A second reason for learning more about what

kinds of issues people identify as ethical in their

everyday work experience is that, to the extent that

the purpose of studying business ethics is to improve

ethical decision-making in the workplace, it would

be helpful to know what types of issues are most

often perceived by people as fitting into that cate-

gory. For instance, if there were significant differ-

ences between the issues perceived by employees

and experts or management, such gaps would need

to be addressed to provide a common base for ethical

dialogues.

And third, we believe it is possible that individuals

might approach decision-making differently when it

concerns issues which have more personal intensity

for them. Jones (1991) has hypothesized the impor-

tance of moral intensity in ethical decision-making

and identified some of its components. Here, we are

suggesting that there may be at least two types of

moral intensity: one type of intensity would be based

on the assessment of the ethical issue’s importance to

society by multiple observers and another type of

Sally J. Power is a professor of Management in the College of

Business at the University of St. Thomas. Her research

interests include career development, business ethics, mana-

gerial decision making, and comparing the Myers Briggs Type

Indicator with the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument.

Lorman L. Lundsten is chair of the Marketing Department in

the College of Business at the University of St. Thomas. He

is an active survey researcher with a wide range of interests.

He has published research dealing with data analysis, the

current state of retailing, economic development, the Mall of

America, business ethics, and personality measures and their

interaction with business teaching.

Journal of Business Ethics (2005) 60: 185–193 � Springer 2005 DOI 10.1007/s10551-005-1177-1

intensity would be based on a more personal assess-

ment of the issue’s importance based on an individ-

ual’s beliefs and/or the perceived probability that

they are likely to be directly involved with the issue.

In order to study those differences researchers would

first need to know which issues might have more

personal intensity than others.

We found three published studies exploring what

situations business people perceive as ethical and one

of these reported very little data. The earliest pub-

lished study was by Waters et al. (1986) in which

they interviewed 40 managers asking them, ‘‘What

ethical questions come up or have come up in the

course of your work life?’’ and then analyzed the 193

situations described. In 1997, Marshall and Dewe

reported the results of a survey they did which in-

cluded the opportunity for respondents to describe,

without prompting, what they considered ethical

issues. This part of the questionnaire, unfortunately,

had a very low response rate. And in 2000, Dukerich

et al. reported an interview study of 40 mid and top

level managers in which they asked them to describe

one moral decision and one non-moral decision.

The study reported here adds significantly to the

data already published. It is a thematic analysis

(Boyatzis, 1998) of 764 ethical challenges perceived

in their workplaces by 280 part-time MBA students,

approximately 98% of whom were also working full-

time in white collar or professional jobs. The larger

amount of data has similarities with earlier findings

but also allows for a better description of the issues

and contexts of these perceived ethical situations.

Our study will be described and its results reported

and integrated with the findings of the other two

studies on perceived ethical issues. Then the dis-

cussion will conclude by exploring the new findings

of the current study, how we believe they might

inform teaching and the study of ethical decision-

making, and some ideas for future studies.

Methodology and sample

Data was collected using a two-sided, single data sheet.

One side of the data sheet gathered demographic

information and the other side asked the open-ended

question, ‘‘What ethical challenges are you aware of in

your business experience?’’ with the additional sen-

tence, ‘‘Please try to describe specific challenges rather

than general topics.’’ Three numbered blanks were

provided with generous space between each blank.

These data collection sheets were handed out midse-

mester to all sections of the beginning course and the

final course in a part-time MBA program. These

courses were chosen to determine whether significant

differences in the challenges were recognized between

those individuals entering the MBA program and

those leaving. It was the class instructor’s decision

about whether the instrument was administered or

not. This provided a respondent group of 280 indi-

viduals, split roughly evenly between the first and last

courses in the curriculum.

The data was analyzed using thematic analysis

which translates qualitative information into a

quantitative format by using a well-defined code and

multiple coders with a high level of reliability in

judgments about applying the code (Boyatzis, 1998).

Because the researchers wanted the data to speak for

itself as much as possible, the code was devised

inductively in what Boyatzis calls a ‘‘hybrid ap-

proach’’ (1989, p. 51). Also, it should be noted that

no attempt was made to prescribe a definition of

‘‘ethical’’ for the respondents because we wanted to

capture their spontaneous responses. These decisions

to approach this study inductively identify it as

within the interpretative research paradigm where

the goal is to generate descriptions based on as few a

priori ideas and existing theories as possible (Giolia

and Pitre, 2001, p. 588).

Developing the code and codebook for the the-

matic analysis involved the first author reading

through the data, making a list of the various issues

and contexts identified by the respondents and

developing definitions of the categories and coding

procedures. A three person coding team of the first

author and two college staff members working in the

area of business ethics then worked together on

samples of the data to refine the code and codebook.

Three judges were used to increase the likelihood of

clear and therefore replicable definitions and pro-

cedures (Boyatzis, 1998, p. 150). Finally, all the data

was coded by all three, trained coders; their coding

compared; and differences among them discussed

until a consensus coding in each instance was

reached (Boyatzis, 1989, pp. 150–151).

Each challenge was categorized in terms of its

issue (i.e., the principles or standards mentioned or

strongly implied by the respondent as the reason the

186 Sally J. Power and Lorman L. Lundsten

situation was an ethical one) and in terms of the

context of the situation described (i.e., the direction

of the treatment and the group identification of the

actor and the target of the action). For example, if

the challenge described was, ‘‘subcontracting the

production of a product without telling the cus-

tomer,’’ the issue would be categorized as ‘‘honesty

– withholding or hiding information’’ and its con-

text categorized as ‘‘treatment of clients/customers

by companies/employees – product manufacturing.’’

Forty-nine specific issues and 21 different con-

texts were identified in an attempt to capture as

much richness as possible from the data. There were

five categories for different instances of dishonesty,

for instance. Also, since stealing might have been

considered either unfairness or dishonesty, at the

point of initial coding it was given its own category.

Challenges mentioning multiple issues in a given

context or multiple contexts with respect to a given

issue were broken apart for the quantitative analysis

that follows.

During the development of the issue code, it be-

came apparent that the respondents perceived three

different kinds of challenges. Thus, the nature of the

challenge was also categorized. This would be con-

sidered an example of latent-content analysis by

Boyatzis (1989, p. 16). He points out that one of the

advantages of thematic analysis is that it allows both

manifest- and latent-content analysis at the same time.

The first type of challenge was the description of a

situation where the lack of some single ethical principle

or standard was the focus of the challenge description.

For example, ‘‘Creating false advertising based on

what customers say they want’’ could be categorized as

focusing on the lack of ‘‘honesty.’’ We called these

types of challenges ‘‘single focus’’ challenges.

The second type of challenge was one in which the

respondent reported that balancing two different issues

was the focus of the challenge; we called these ‘‘bal-

anced pair’’ challenges since they involved two issues

that needed to be balanced. An example was, ‘‘Bal-

ancing environmental concerns with corporate prof-

its.’’ And the third type of challenge was one in which

the respondent reported difficulties or uncertainty in

terms of personal behavior (their own or others) in

relation to some other ethical issue. An example would

be, ‘‘not reporting true expenses on expense reports

when no one will know.’’ We referred to these chal-

lenges as ‘‘personal pair’’ challenges. Finally, there were

also challenges that mentioned multiple issues or

contexts in a single statement. For example, ‘‘honesty

to customers and employees;’’ these were broken apart

into multiple single focus challenges to do the quanti-

tative analysis reported here.

Results

Sample demographics

The sample was comprised of working adults enrolled

in an evening MBA program in a medium-sized

Midwestern university. Their ages ranged from 23 to

58 with a mode of 29 and median of 30. The mode

number of years in the workforce was 8 and the

median between 8 and 9. Sixty percent were male,

37% had children, and 59% were supervisors.

Ninety-four percent were Caucasian. Forty-three

percent were protestant, 39% catholic, and 18% re-

ported other religious preferences. Seventeen per-

cent worked in finance, 23% in information systems

and engineering, 13% in marketing, 10% in

accounting, 9% in general management, and the

remaining 28% in a variety of other areas.

When comparing the beginning MBA students to

those leaving the program a chi square test showed

that the demographics differed significantly in ways

that might be expected. The individuals leaving the

program were older, had been in the workforce

longer, were more likely to have children and be

supervisors. A comparison of the two groups using a

chi square test showed no significant differences in

issues and contexts groups.

Types of challenges

Each of the 280 respondents was asked to describe 3

challenges by virtue of the 3 spaces provided on the

data collection sheet. They described a total of 764

challenges, an average of 2.7 challenges per respon-

dent. The vast majority (83%) of challenges are

single focus challenges. Seven percent were balanced

pairs and 10% were personal pairs. There was no

apparent pattern regarding the respondents’ use of

the three types of challenges, but 37% of the

respondents described at least one challenge as either

a balanced pair or a personal pair. The issues raised

within both types of paired challenges will be

Perceptions of Ethical Issues 187

reported separately from the single focus challenges.

An analysis of the contexts or context-issue combi-

nations for the two alternate types of challenges was

not undertaken because of the relatively small

number of these types of challenges.

Issues

To facilitate analysis, the categories were regrouped

into six issue groups: Honesty, Fairness, Personal

Issues, Relationship Issues, Complex Business Issues,

and Other Issues. Of course, which issues were

aggregated into which groups was somewhat arbi-

trary and so the specifics of the groupings as well as

the frequencies of each group have been reported in

Table I. These groups were selected because they

represented the primary ethical foci of the challenges.

Honesty and fairness clearly focus on virtues or

the lack of them. Personal issues focus on the

behavior of a person, either the respondent or

someone else, in terms of a personal issue such as a

lack of courage or a quandary about the situation.

Relationship Issues, in contrast, describe interactions

involving more than one person. For instance,

people not fulfilling their job responsibilities in the

respondent’s perception were seen as a relationship

issue as was backstabbing and inappropriate rela-

TABLE I

Frequency and make up of issue emphasis groups

Issue Group Issues Included in Issue Group Frequency

(Percent of Responses)

Complex,

business issues

Conflicts of interest; Privacy or misuse of information;

Concern about excessive corporate profit; Compliance;

Product or service quality; Competitive practices or

relationships; Environmental issues; Safety; International issues;

Work-Life balance; Sexual harassment; Insider trading or

other illegal acts; Executive compensation; Corporate social

responsibility or citizenship

199 (21.5%)

Honesty Manipulating or misreporting financial figures; Over-Billing;

Withholding or hiding information or not telling the whole truth;

Selling something the customer doesn’t need; Stealing via

expense reports

189 (20.4%)

Personal issues Stealing time from employer; Lack of integrity; Courage;

Not knowing what to do; Reporting another’s

unethical or other behavior; Self-interest; Acting in

conflict with corporate policy; All other instances of

unhappiness with corporate policy

156 (16.9%)

Relationship issues Taking credit for other’s work; Favoritism; Stealing ideas

or clients; Inappropriate relationships; Backstabbing;

Other instances of problems with others; Not being

respected as an individual; Being threatened with losing

your job; Being asked to do something unethical;

Being asked to do something you don’t agree with;

Others not taking ownership of the job

142 (15.4%)

Fairness issues Discrimination; Taking advantage of customers;

Other instances of unfairness

129 (13.9%)

Other Any otherwise unspecified issues including loyalty,

and bribes or rebates; Unclear issues

110 (11.8%)

Totals 925 (100.0%)

188 Sally J. Power and Lorman L. Lundsten

tionships. Finally, the Complex Business Issues

Emphasis Group included those challenges that focus

on issues well-known and often discussed in society

that usually involve a number of ethical issues. These

Complex Business Issues were most often described

by the respondents by simply using well-known

words or phrases such as sexual harassment or work/

family balance. As Table I shows, the Complex

Business Issues Group had the highest frequency

(22%) while the Fairness Group had the lowest

(13.9%) with the other issue groups drawing

between 15% and 20% each.

Within the Complex Business Issue Emphasis

Group, the single issue most often mentioned was

concern about corporate profits being too large (23%

of the issues in the group). Within the Honesty

Issues Emphasis Group two specific issues stood out.

Withholding or hiding information was the single

most often identified issue (24%); manipulating

financial figures and over-billing was second in fre-

quency (21%). Within the Personal Issues Emphasis

Group self-interest was most often mentioned single

issue (40%). And within the Relationship Issues

Emphasis Group, not fulfilling job responsibilities

was described most often (36%). Finally, discrimi-

nation was the most often identified issue (41% of

the responses) within the Fairness Issues Emphasis

Group. ‘‘Discrimination’’ could also have been

included within the Complex Business Issues

Emphasis Group. Had that categorization been used,

it would have been the most often mentioned issue

in that group as well.

Fifty-five percent of the balanced-pair challenges

(where the respondent reported that balancing two

different issues was the challenge) paired some issue

with concern about large corporate profits. Con-

cern about corporate profits was paired with 13

other issues; the most frequent of these was quality

of product or service (in 29% of the pairings) and

taking advantage of customers (in 16% of the

pairings).

The most common personal pair challenges

(where the respondent described a concern about

personal behavior in relation to another ethical issue)

reported were linked with either self interest and

another issue (in 19% of the pairings) or honesty and

another issue (in 19% of the pairings). Self interest

and honesty were linked together as a pair in an

additional 14% of these challenges.

Contexts

To simplify analysis, the 21 contexts were aggregated

into 9 context groups. The context groups were

determined by looking at those contexts with small

frequencies and attempting to aggregate them with

the other contexts in some meaningful way. Table II

describes the make up of each context group along

with the frequencies for each group. The three most

often mentioned contexts were: employer treatment

of employees, not including supervisory interactions

(18%); employee/company treatment of customers

(17%), and employee treatment of employer, not

including relating to supervisors (11%).

Bivariate analysis of issue and context groups

Because the vast majority of the single focused

challenges described both an issue emphasis and a

context, we decided to do a Pareto analysis of the

various combinations of context and issue groups. A

Pareto analysis identifies which few cells of the

bivariate table have the most population and, simply

because of their size, seem worthy of further con-

sideration. A chi square analysis was not possible

because there were too many cells with zero

observations.

Table III shows the table used for the Pareto

analysis. Twenty-nine percent of the issue emphasis

group-context group interactions fell into five of the

cells: fairness to employees by the company

(n ¼ 56), honesty toward customers (n ¼ 42), the company’s treatment of society in terms of well-

known business issues (n ¼ 38), employer treatment of employees in terms of relationship issues (n ¼ 31), and employees’ honesty to their employers (n ¼ 29). This analysis shows that the challenges are fairly well

distributed over the issue and context groups, which

was a noted goal of the aggregation process. Still,

these five pairings stood out in the Pareto analysis.

Discussion

Of course, any single study of this sort has limita-

tions. As pointed out earlier, there have been rela-

tively few studies on the perception of ethical issues

published to date. We believe that more studies

should be done to refine or question the findings

Perceptions of Ethical Issues 189

reported here. In particular studies which include

more racially and ethnically diverse respondents,

part-time students from more than one institution,

and working adults who are not in school would be

helpful.

The results of this study will be discussed and

compared with the results of the two other interview

studies that produced significant amounts of data

concerning what real world situations are recognized

as ethical by business people. Both earlier studies

involved interviewing middle and upper level

managers. Our study had mostly lower level man-

agers (59% had supervisory responsibility in a pop-

ulation whose median age was 30) and individual

contributors as respondents thus widening the gen-

eralizability of the common findings discussed be-

low. In addition, our study which involved over

triple the number of situations analyzed previously

allows us to explore more specifics about how

people conceptualize what they perceive as ethical

situations in their workplace. Those new findings

will also be discussed.

A basic commonality among all three studies is

that most subjects could readily identify situations

they believed were ethical. Waters et al. reported

that in all cases the managers they interviewed

were able to talk about a few cases ‘‘in which they

were called upon to act on the basis of moral

judgments’’ (1986, p. 374). (It should be noted that

Waters et al. specifically states that they used

TABLE II

Frequency and make up of context groups

Context group Contexts included in context group Frequency (percent

of responses)

Employees/Company

treatment of customer

Treatment of customers regarding billing,

pricing, manufacturing and quality,

and everything else

132 (16.9%)

Employer treatment

of employees

Policies and other management treatment

except that specifically identified as

by one’s supervisor

174 (22.3%)

Company or employees

treatment of society

Treatment of society by company

or employees by breaking the law

and all other incidents

66 (8.5%)

Boss-subordinate

treatment of each other

Supervisors considering their

treatment of supervisees and

treatment of supervisors by subordinates

45 (5.8%)

Employee treatment of other

employees

Treatment of other employees by employees 41 (5.3%)

Employee treatment

of employer

Treatment of company by employees 85 (10.9%)

Personal behavior Personal behavior identified

by respondent as own behavior

and all other’s behavior

46 (5.9%)

Other contexts Other actor combinations or

unclear actors, such as international contexts,

treatment of other companies by

company/employees, and vendors by

company/employees

131 (16.8%)

No context given No context given 60 (7.7%)

Totals 780 (100.0%)

190 Sally J. Power and Lorman L. Lundsten

‘‘moral’’ and ‘‘ethical’’ interchangeably.) Dukerich

et al. (2000), reported that only 9 of the 40 people

interviewed had some difficulty at first identifying

a problem that was of an ethical nature, but all

were eventually able to do so. In our study, the

average number of ethical challenges provided by

the 280 respondents was 2.7.

Another commonality was the preponderance of

what we call single focus challenges being

described, that is, challenges in which the respon-

dent describes with assurance that an ethical prin-

ciple has been violated. These challenges may have

been focused on a clear violation of a well accepted

ethical standard such as honesty or a much more

complex situation about which respondents were

certain about the rightness of their positions but

others might not have been. An analysis of whether

these issues were ‘‘correctly’’ perceived was beyond

the scope of this study. These single focus chal-

lenges made up 83% of the conceptualizations in

our study. The work of Waters et al. (1986) found

that certainty about the moral standards used in the

situation was expressed either directly or indirectly

in 84% of the situations described.

In a much smaller set of situations, the respondents

conceptualized the challenges in terms of balancing

organizational concerns (i.e., the balanced pairs, 7%

of the challenges) or in terms of acting congruently

with ethical values (i.e, the personal pairs, 10% of the

challenges). Dukerich et al. also appear to have found

something similar to the balanced pairs combination

because they write that some of the situations they

heard described focused on ‘‘the need to ‘balance

competing interests’ ’’ (2000, p. 34).

These differing conceptualizations of ethical

challenges may explain part of the teaching challenge

of engaging many students – if they think they know

what is ethical, they may not perceive a need to

discuss the issue but perhaps see the problem as

managing the behavior of others. Although some

might hope that substantial experience in the

working world would help people appreciate the

grey areas related to acting ethically, this is appar-

ently not the case for a majority when reporting

issues they perceive as ethical. This data would

suggest that a prime focus of teaching ethics may be

in helping students shift from a more black and

white view of ethics in the working world to seeing

issues more often in relation to behaving congru-

ently with one’s ethics or determining how to bal-

ance competing concerns or desires.

Because of the larger number of situations

described in our study, we are able to report issues and

contexts which were identified with more frequency.

We found a large variety of issues and contexts de-

scribed in our study. Nonetheless, through analysis

TABLE III

Issue emphasis groups by context groups

Issue groupfi Context groupfl

Honesty Fairness Personal Relationship Complex

Corporate

Other Totals

Company treatment

of customer

42 15 2 6 19 14 98

Employer treatment

of employees

17 56 23 32 24 16 168

Company/employees

treatment of society

16 1 1 0 38 4 60

Boss-subordinate

relationships

8 3 2 7 3 5 28

Employee treatment

of employees

2 3 4 17 3 4 33

Employee treatment

of employer

29 1 15 18 6 4 73

Personal behavior 4 3 12 9 8 3 39

Other 24 13 4 15 31 34 121

No context given 11 14 5 5 11 9 55

Totals 153 109 68 109 143 93 675

Perceptions of Ethical Issues 191

we were able to identify areas where significant

numbers of students already perceive ethical issues.

We believe these situations, because of their higher

frequencies would have what we would call a per-

sonal moral intensity and would lead to more engaged

discussion in the ethics classroom.

Quantitatively, our respondents conceptualized

their ethical challenges in terms of the virtues of

honesty or fairness (39%), intrapersonal or relationship

issues (36%), or in terms of complex business issues

(24%) as reported in Table I. It is interesting to note

the size of the focus on intrapersonal and relationship

issues. That size would be slightly larger if the personal

pair challenges were added since they were analyzed

separately. Such intrapersonal and relationship issues

seldom take up much time within business ethics

courses (Adams et al., 1998; Ghorpade, 1991) and

may not even be considered issues of business ethics,

although they appear to make up more than a third of

the issues perceived in the workplace.

Further specificity can be added to these issues by

remembering that discrimination was the most fre-

quently identified issue within the fairness group;

self-interest in the intrapersonal issues group; people

not fulfilling job responsibilities in the relationship

issues group; and concerns about excessive company

profits in the complex business issues group. Fur-

thermore, concern about excessive corporate profits

was also the most frequent issue in the balanced pair

issues. Again, it should be noted that what respon-

dents identified as ethical issues might well not be

considered ethical by experts in the field. This sug-

gests that a discussion of what might be considered

an ethical issue and why could be a fruitful begin-

ning discussion in classes of working adults.

We also categorized the ethical situations

described in terms of the contexts or the relation-

ships that were related to the issues themselves (see

Table II). The two most frequent contexts described

were treatment of employees by their employers

(excluding situations specifically identified a super-

visor supervisee interaction) and treatment of cus-

tomers by companies or their employees; together

these two contexts accounted for almost 40% of the

situation descriptions while the other 60% of the

situations involved the other six category groups.

Looking at gross frequencies of issues or contexts is

one method for identifying issues that may be of more

natural interest to part-time students, but the size of

our data base allowed us to also identify the issue-

context combinations that were most frequent. Our

Pareto analysis identified five combinations as

involving approximately 30% of the challenges

described. In all but one case, they can be paired with

the most frequently mentioned issue in the analysis of

the single focus issue groups to increase the likely

recognition of ethical issues as present in their working

lives. The five combinations with added emphasis are

• companies’ fairness to employees with an emphasis on discrimination issues,

• companies’ or employees honesty to customers with an emphasis on withholding or hiding

information,

• companies’ treatment of society with respect to complex business issues with an emphasis on

the issue of what might be excessive corporate

profits,

• employees’ honesty to employers with an emphasis on hiding or withholding informa-

tion, and

• employer treatment of employees in terms of relationship issues.

The most frequent issue in the relationship issue

group was others not taking ownership of their jobs.

This context group is about employer treatment of

employees and is focused more on policies or acts by

management generally (versus direct supervisors). We

did an analysis of these incidents and found a range of

issues mentioned such as management not respecting

employees, not appearing to select the most compe-

tent to do tasks, not managing conflict well, and

employees not agreeing with corporate policy.

Jones (1991) has hypothesized that issues with the

highest moral intensity will be most often mentioned

as ethical issues. The issues and context combina-

tions just described would appear to have at least

what we call personal moral intensity for our part-

time students. While experts may not agree about

the importance of many of these issues as business

ethics issues, they are what these working adults

categorize as ethical issues in their workplace.

In addition to doing similar studies with more

diverse populations, we would suggest four addi-

tional ways for continuing this line of research. First,

a questionnaire could be developed asking students

to identify those issues they believe would be most

192 Sally J. Power and Lorman L. Lundsten

interesting to study in an ethics class. Such a ques-

tionnaire could include brief descriptions of the most

frequently described context and issues described

here but also include other ethical situations to see if

students selected the issues highlighted here more

frequently. Regardless of the outcome of the study,

the questionnaire results could be used to guide

course topics. It might also be useful to re-administer

the questionnaire at the end of a course to see if the

sensitivity of the students had changed during the

semester.

A second area of study would be to attempt to

develop a universally embraceable, codified body of

content regarding MBA-level business ethics educa-

tion. Our study has suggested what kinds of issues and

contexts at least one group of part-time MBA students

who work fulltime identified. Other similar studies

would probably expand and refine our list substan-

tially. Once that work was well underway, discussion

about what should be addressed in business ethics

classes could be undertaken with greater focus.

A third area of study would be to focus on one issue

or a related set of issues such as discrimination or

people perceiving that others are not fulfilling their

job responsibilities, exploring in more depth exactly

what people who identify those as ethical issues are

objecting to, and comparing their findings to the

work of ethicists on the subject. Such studies might

lead to a better understanding of the definition of

ethical issues as well as how to teach about such issues.

And finally a fourth type of study would be to

explore the relative importance of these issues as

perceived by working adults with other ethical is-

sues. Such studies would further explore the Jones’

concept of moral intensity and our own of personal

moral intensity. Dukerich et al. (2000) and Marshall

and Dewe (1997) have begun down such a path and

we hope that our identification of issues that seem to

have more intensity for working adults can help to

continue that investigation.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Kenneth E. Goodpaster,

Koch Chair in Business Ethics at the University of

St. Thomas, for his financial support and Dawn Elm,

Susan Heckler, and the Journal of Business Ethics

reviewers for their comments about the manuscript.

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Sally J. Power

University of St. Thomas,

TMH 343, 1000 LaSalle Ave., Minneapolis, MN

55403,

U.S.A.

E-mail: [email protected],

Lorman L. Lundsten

University of St. Thomas,

TMH 343, 1000 LaSalle Ave., Minneapolis, MN

55403,

U.S.A.

Perceptions of Ethical Issues 193

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