Interview with Roy J Lewicki on Building Ethical Organizations
August 2009 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Prof. Roy J Lewicki
Irving Abramowitz Professor of Business Ethics and Professor of Management and Human Resources Max M Fisher College of Business

• For the benefit of our readers and business ethics teachers across the globe, can you please share your delivery approach to business ethics / honesty and fairness in organizations course? Is there a bestway to sensitize and sterilize the managers and would-be managers on corrupt business ethics practices?
  I do not know whether there is a best way. My experience in trying to teach students ‘ethical reasoning’ is that ethical theories and complex ethical analysis are not difficult and foreign concepts for students to grasp, but that they definitely have strong concerns about which ethical tools to apply to various situations, and to think them through. Instead, I have adopted an approach that helps students identify their personal values, how those values drive their decisions, and how to understand challenges to those values as a result of the pressures from peers and business contexts to compromise these values. Much of this general approach has been articulated by Jim Clawson of The Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia in his book, Level Three Leadership, and by Bill George in his book, True North. Both of these books are central reading in my class. Around these principles, I have put together a series of cases, activities and speakers that help students understand how organizations can create a positive or negative climate for honesty and fairness, how values are central to effective or ineffective leadership, and how leaders have either succeeded or failed at important decisions when guided by these values. Students actively discuss the George book, write a personal paper on how they managed a challenge to their integrity (successfully or not), and prepare a group project and presentation on a leader who has either failed or passed an ‘integrity challenge’. Students seem to like and appreciate this approach, and my course has grown fromabout 25MBA students a year to about 60 students a year.

• Recently, Jon M Huntsman wrote an interesting book, Winners Never Cheat: Everyday Values We Learned as Children (But May Have Forgotten), wherein he chronicles the story of Huntsman Corp’s extraordinary perseverance in doing business the ethical way. Why don’t we see more of such companies and what, according to you should be done to see more of such companies?
  This is a difficult question because there are so many reasons. Many would say that corporate executives simply do not believe that ethical conduct contributes directly to the bottom line or to increases in stock price. I think it is more complex than that. In my view, the primary reason is that many CEOs simply do not embrace ethical conduct as a strong corporate priority for their companies. Either they don’t embrace it, or they do say they value it but don’t ‘walk their talk’ in key decisions. It is very clear that the ‘tone at the top’ (the climate set by the conduct of the senior executives) is one of the major determinants of a company’s ethical conduct, and if the CEO does not make it a strong organizational priority, it will not happen. It is not that these CEOs are unethical—they just don’t emphasize it enough as a key component of their leadership.

• Every aspect of a business is being ranked – Fortune 500, Most Admired Companies, Most Innovative Companies, Best Companies To Work For, Highest Paid CEOs, Most Influential Business Leaders, Best Corporate Governance Practices, Best Global Brands, etc. Why not ranking for Business Ethics Practices? (Although Transparency International’s ratings serve a limited purpose of assessing least corrupt countries, and not companies)
  Informal certification is beginning to happen in the areas of Environmental practices, corporate social responsibility, etc. A magazine that used to be called Business Ethics and is now called Corporate Social Responsibility has recently begun that ranking process. The challenge is to effectively create the right standards that can be used to rate these companies, and determine how to monitor those standards. I think the primary reason that it has NOT happened is that there is no formal ‘accrediting agency’—comparable to a medical board, or an accounting standards board, or a legal bar association—that can write standards and monitor them to assure compliance with such a code.