Ethical Challenges
The study of Saata et al. (2012) discussed a very interesting point concerning the degree of ethical awareness of engineering students and the role of ethics education in preparing the students for ethical issues in the workplace, such as misusing work hours, stealing information, receiving/giving gifts, etc.
In alignment with the argument made by Rest (1984 cited in Saata et al., 2012) that the ethical awareness was content specific, the study pointed out that the ethical awareness of an individual varied depending on the context and situation, in other words, an individual who demonstrated a high degree of ethical awareness in one situation might be completely unaware in another.
In specific, while the engineering students in the study tended to be more ethically sensitive to business-related issues, they appeared to be more tolerant with unethical behaviors in the engineering context. This finding is interesting to me because it is totally contradictory to what I thought. I expected engineering students who have thorough understanding of their field but lack of experience with business world would be highly aware of their field’s ethical issues and less aware of the ones related to business.
Besides the context, the study also indicated that gender played a notable role in ethical awareness as the female engineering students tended to be aware of ethical issues better than their male counterparts. The authors did not discuss the reason, but they suggested an implication that female engineering students should be given more opportunities to play managerial roles who often made important decisions in the organization.
The author argued that ethical aspect often played an important role in decision making process and as female engineers had better ethical awareness, they could make better decision. Even though women have been always underrepresented in the field of engineering and they should be encouraged to play more important roles in the engineering workforce, I do not think ethics is a convincing reason for promoting a female engineer to a managerial position.
Understanding two factors – context and gender - which impact the ethical awareness of students is meaningful and essential to further discuss how ethics education should be conducted to prepare students for the workplace. It is worth suggesting that ethics education should be more emphasized in higher education.
As unethical behaviors may not only render considerable financial loss for organizations in particular and the entire society in general but also affect negatively to the future career of students, I think that the completion of the course on ethics should be compulsory for college graduation. Especially, the course should not only focus on ethical issues related to business in general but should strengthen the awareness of context specific issues as well.
I am not sure if workplace ethics is taught in the U.S. colleges, but in my country, we do not have any course discussing this topic in college. The scarcity of ethics education has caused graduated students less competent, professional, and productive when getting into the workplace. Using office hours and company properties for personal business are pervasive. From the companies’ perspective, they must take valuable time and resources to provide ethics training for newly-hired employees and monitor unethical behaviors. Therefore, I believe that introducing ethics education in college to early expose students to workplace ethical issues would help solve these problems.
As I mentioned earlier, the article did not examine the reason behind the discrepancy in ethical awareness between two genders. Therefore, I am wondering what makes the difference and how the difference would affect the way ethics education should be developed and delivered.
Reference:
Saata, M. M., Bakara, S. A., Rafaib, N. H., & Amin, A. M. (2012). Ethical challenges in the workplace: Are these future engineers prepared? Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 40, 269-273. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187704281200657X
