Teaching Ethics: The Underpinnings
Volume 14, Number 4 Article by Fr Cyriac December, 2002
Teaching Ethics: The Underpinnings :
Fr Cyriac, Professor of Organisational Behaviour, IIM Kozhikode, begins by questioning whether management education as it is imparted today, is sending confusing signals to well-intentioned students.
Managers certainly need an ethical framework in order to function effectively and the crucial issue in business ethics revolves around the anchor base of values. While experts in the field often take pleasure in comparing different theories and approaches, what is needed in management education and practice is an honest attempt to balance means and ends, processes and products, consumption and preservation, competition and cooperation, IQ and EQ, self and society. In this framework business is perceived as a relationship, a community, an extended family, which operates in a web of moral obligations and privileges. The balancing force that energises every step in this process is a contract at the grass-root level. Public administration monitors it, while ethics goes further and appeals to the humanising and socialising factors, before touching the spiritual realms. The Indian traditional concept of the oneness of being, oneness of man with others and with Nature therefore becomes a yardstick to measure moral values in general and managerial ethics in particular. It is important that not only individuals but also organisations and corporations possess a strong, amiable and expressive character. Future managers should be sensitised to the fundamental human values in analysing social and global issues. Their ethics need to be inward looking – honest to self; and outward shining – accountable to the world outside.
Scriptural traditions, mythological fables and case studies of role models, frank and open discussion in the classroom where complicated situations are presented from different sides, individual introspection and personal reflection are suited to value inculcation.
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