Only if the examples are of a particular type and taught in a particular way. Back in 2006, a group of professors from a variety of business disciplines got together to teach a class using the examples of Enron, Worldcom, Tyco and Shell.

From the article at SmartPros –

At the end of the semester, the number of students in a simulated trading room who were caught in misconduct or misusing information for insider trading was significantly higher than at the beginning. The students said, “You taught us how to do it,” Buono recalled.

“For those of us who’ve spent our careers teaching this, it’s been a disappointing time,” said Buono, who has taught at the Waltham, Mass., college for 27 years. “Some of the most renowned names in the corporate world are now jokes at cocktail parties. And they were led by graduates of our business programs.

Obviously, the teaching of unfortunate case studies is not the best route to ethical behavior. The professors decided to try a new tack and taught examples from a perspective of moral heroism.

Their initial studies indicated some success.

What’s my take? I loath case studies. My favorite example is a case in which the employee is put crossways with his boss over a fairly minor issue that would however, result in the loss of his job. The study goes on to explain that his wife is in the hospital and his children are in an expensive private school. The case study is loaded for one side. It is obvious students will do the correct and moral thing on a test but take away from the class, the real lesson, the lesson of getting along.

In other words, this kind of ethics teaching is negative ethics teaching. This example clearly indicated that a moral life is expensive and damaging to a career, and that it really doesn’t matter anyway. After all, management will get someone to do the immoral act anyway. Just Great! We desperately need a generation of ethically sound business leaders and our business schools can’t even get ethics case studies right.

How much change in the case study movement do you think has happened since 2006? Why do we have case studies anyway? Simple, it is good class discussion and easy to teach. So we wind up with generations of moral phonies, because business ethics teachers are unwilling to do their job because it’s hard.

My contempt for standard textbooks and standard business ethics teaching is hard to put into words. I write my own class material emphasizing individual moral development. Each individual student charts out an ethical course for their life path. As the semester progresses the students are asked what changes occur because of their exposure to Catholic Social Doctrine, etc. An individual with a thought out moral system is much more likely to make the right decision when confronted with an ethical problem. You prepare a student to be a good human being. That’s the heart of teaching. You don’t teach him silly examples that he will quickly discard as not being part of the real world, you teach that a life lived nobly and honestly is better than the other choices.

James Pilant