Teaching Ethics and Leadership with Cases: A Bottom-Up Approach

The issue of ethics in leadership has taken greater importance in the today’s business world due to globalization and rapid advancement in information technology which has significantly transformed current business practices. Most universities in the United States (US) now have at least one course that includes ethics or related topics in their undergraduate engineering curricula. However, due to qualitative and abstract nature of the topic, the ethics course does not draw the same level of attention from students compared to other courses like physics and math. In this paper, we propose an innovative way of teaching ethics and leadership topics at the undergraduate level. In particular, the paper presents a case study of a senior level course in ethics and leadership development for an Industrial Distribution program at a major university in the Southwestern US. The course focuses on learning about personal leadership skills within the context of an organization. It examines the role and purpose of ethics in business and presents methods of moral reasoning in order to resolve ethical dilemmas. The paper describes how teaching based on “case study” approach has improved students understanding of the concepts and generated interest in the topic. We also discuss a sample case and overall course planning and execution framework, just in case any other instructor is considering teaching the similar course. Finally, student feedbacks are presented to demonstrate the successful implementation of the proposed teaching method. Introduction Although leadership is practiced at all levels in an organization, members of an organization may know very little about the strategy and psychology of leadership. One of the dilemmas for business leaders around the world, the ones with a moral compass, is the question of the applicability of business ethics. The concept of business ethics refers to the unwritten moral code that guides the manner in which business is practiced. Unlike legal requirements that are backed up by the force of law and sanctions, ethical codes are generally not legally required in the sense that there are no lists of sanctions for poor business ethics. However, the issue of corporate responsibility is a practice that business leaders around the world understand to be a necessity, both from the point of good morals, profitability, and from the point of maintaining a good relationship with the community in which the organization is located. Ethics and leaderships have now become an integral part of engineering undergraduate degree curricula in US engineering schools and are mandated by the accreditation agency like ABET. The importance of ethics has been well recognized by many engineering colleges and universities around the world as they are the ones who produce the next generation of business leaders. Educators such as Bird and Sieber (2005) suggest that there are a number of reasons that can justify the teaching ethics to undergraduate (UG) engineering students and argue that the following are the key reasons for necessity of teaching ethics at UG level: (a) many public policy decisions are based on scientific reasoning and findings; (b) engineers are also part of society and they work to improve the lives of human beings; and (c) there could be huge personal interest and “conflicting professional interests” in a number of projects in which an engineer is involved. Colby and Sullivan (2008), sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation, conducted a comparative analysis of ethics courses taught at several US business schools in which the case method was utilized. Colby and Sullivan (2008) reported that that in almost all schools they studied, the primary goal of the ethics course was to teach the professional codes of ethics, which include: public safety, health and welfare, and protection of environment; loyalty to both employer and customers; fairness; intellectual properties of others; conflicts of interest; and discrimination and unfair competition. Chan et al. (2012) describe entrepreneurship, professionalism, and leadership as three key aspects of today’s engineering careers which are increasingly becoming “boundaryless”. Leadership education has also garnered immense attraction recently in engineering curricula across the world as today’s globalized market presents the students with great technical leadership challenges (Khattak, Ku, and Goh, 2012). Interestingly, leadership class examples found in the literature varies in both scope and learning framework. Some programs are designed as a certificate in leadership by offering multiple courses whereas others are associated with laboratory projects, senior design projects, machine safety, or similar environment where students have to deal with multiple aspects including team work, human-machine interactions, etc. For example, Wu (2008) presents a case study of teaching safety leadership at Taiwanese universities. A prior study shows that universities in the Europe and Australia also follow the project based approach in teaching leadership to engineering students ((Khattak et al., 2012). Penn State’s (USA) Engineering Leadership Development Minor (EDLM) is a slightly different model than any project based leadership model used in laboratories. The EDLM Model requires students to take multiple courses in leadership focusing on core leadership qualities, global leadership qualities, and 21 century leadership qualities (Schuhmann, 2011). Similarly, Babucia, Craig, and Connor (2012) discuss MIT satellite development program projects which provide students with the leadership education through a project based approach. The MIT program is a three-term class focusing on engineering topics and developed for implementation at satellite locations. Babucia et al (2012) report their model has been adopted around the world. Similar to leadership, there are various pedagogical models available in the literature with respect to teaching ethics in UG classes. Bird and Sieber (2005) suggest that ethics in science and engineering cannot be taught simply through observational examples and argue that learning by observation requires interpretation which can create confusion and misunderstanding. Billington (2006) suggests teaching ethics by incorporating historical examples and cases and making the class “visual” so students can better understand ethical scenarios. Further, Conlon and Zandvoort (2011) suggest that ethics courses should focus on the role of organizational culture and societal norms rather than on the role of a single individual. In the present paper, we propose a comprehensive approach for teaching an ethics and leadership course. More specifically, we utilize real world cases in our course and unlike the approach of using observational examples and a top-down approach (Bird and Sieber, 2005), we propose to engage students in actually analyzing case studies (a bottom-up approach) by using scientific methods and to have the students make recommendations by considering the broader impact of the culture of organization included in the case analysis. The remainder of our paper is organized into the following three sections. In the first section, course objectives, learning outcomes and assessment methods are explained to the participating students. After that, a sample case study is utilized to demonstrate our teaching approach. Lastly, we conclude our paper with some remarks on student and industry feedback on the course. Ethics and Leadership Course in Industrial Distribution Program As mentioned earlier, this paper presents a case study of a senior level course in ethics and leadership development for an Industrial Distribution program at a major university in the Southwestern US. In addition to lectures on various ethical concepts and models together with lectures on and leadership theories, the course consists of several real world industry cases. Students are required to perform analysis on those cases and answer several questions pertaining to leadership and ethical issues surrounding different business situations. The actual learning takes place through these cases. The course is designed in such a way that students are highly engaged in class activities and performing an in-depth case analysis. In the following paragraphs, we describe the course objectives, learning outcomes, and assessment methods of student learning.