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Journal of Education for Business
ISSN: 0883-2323 (Print) 1940-3356 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vjeb20
Right and Wrong and Cultural Diversity:
Replication of the 2002 NAS/Zogby Poll on
Business Ethics
Marty Ludlum & Sergei Mascaloinov
To cite this article: Marty Ludlum & Sergei Mascaloinov (2004) Right and Wrong and Cultural Diversity: Replication of the 2002 NAS/Zogby Poll on Business Ethics, Journal of Education for Business, 79:5, 294-298, DOI: 10.3200/JOEB.79.5.294-298
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.3200/JOEB.79.5.294-298
Published online: 07 Aug 2010.
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n fall 2002, business ethics was a major topic of discussion. With the collapse of large corporations—Enron in December 2001 and WorldCom in August 2002—and Tyco’s criminal fraud indictments in September 2002, readers of the mainstream media were bombarded with tales of corruption and unethical business practices. From the evening news to the local newspapers, the media’s coverage of the new busi-ness scandals could not be avoided.
Apparently, the information has had an impact. A December 2002 survey of college students reported in Business Weekindicated that 84% of college stu-dents believe that the United States is having a business crisis (Weisul, 2002). The impetus for this survey came from the NAS/Zogby Poll of College Seniors from April 2002 (NAS/Zogby, 2002a). That survey posed business ethics ques-tions to 401 college seniors. The finding that jumped off the page was that only a quarter of the college students felt that there were “clear and uniform standards of right and wrong by which every one should be judged” (NAS/Zogby, 2002b). The NAS/Zogby Poll found that 76% of the respondents indicated that right and wrong “depends on differ-ences in individual values and cultural diversity” (NAS/Zogby, 2002a).
In this study, we attempted to repli-cate the NAS/Zogby findings in a larger
sample of college students. We wanted to determine whether students support-ed uniform standards of right and wrong and whether there would be any differ-ences in the responses of the students according to demographic differences.
College students will be the next gen-eration of business employees, owners, managers, and regulators. The impres-sion made during their college years will last a lifetime. Academic researchers have long studied how college students’ ethical views affect their behavior (Johns & Strand, 2000; Rawwas & Isak-son, 2000) and how that behavior might translate into expected work behaviors (Knotts, Lopez, & Mesak, 2000; Sanders, 2002; Silver & Valentine,
2000). Nonis and Swift (2001a, 2001b) have done preliminary work demon-strating a link between unethical views during college and unethical behavior in the workforce. Moreover, the college years may be the only time when stu-dents seriously discuss the issue of busi-ness ethics. The views they have today will be a reflection of the business cli-mate over the next 30 years.
Survey of Recent Literature
Besides the growing interest in ethics among the public at large, there has been a growing concern over ethics in higher education in general and over ethical training for business in particu-lar. Historically, much of the past research emphasized gender-based dif-ferences in the attitudes toward ethics.
Barnett and Brown (1994) found that gender (along with economic back-ground of the student) explained much of the difference in ethical views. This result supports many previous studies’ finding that female students tend to be more ethical than male students (Arlow, 1991; Beltramini, Peterson, & Kozmet-sky, 1984; Borkowski & Ugras, 1992; Davis & Welton, 1991; Ferrell & Skin-ner, 1988; Jones & Gautschi, 1988; Laczniak & Inderrieden, 1987; Meising & Preble, 1985; Peterson, Beltramini, & Kozmetsky, 1991; Ruegger & King,
Right and Wrong and Cultural
Diversity: Replication of the 2002
NAS/Zogby Poll on Business Ethics
MARTY LUDLUM SERGEI MASCALOINOV
Oklahoma City Community College Ulyanovsk State University Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Ulyanovsk, Russia
I
ABSTRACT. In April 2002, a NAS/Zogby poll found that only a quarter of sampled students perceived uniform standards of “right and wrong” and that most students felt that ethical behavior depends on cultural diversity. In this effort to replicate those findings in a larger sample of American college students, the authors obtained results that contradict the findings of the NAS/Zogby poll. Com-paring their results across six demo-graphic student subsets (gender, stock-holder, smoker, major, year in school, and business ethics student), the authors found significant differences between some of the groups. The results suggest that students are con-cerned with business ethics and that their opinions are likely to influence their future employment decisions.
1992; Shepard & Hartenian, 1990; Whipple & Swords, 1992) and in the workforce (Barnett & Carson, 1989; Smith & Rogers, 2000). This finding was true for students outside America as well (Tse & Au, 1997).
Many researchers have indicated that perhaps the ethical views that women hold are conditioned on their role as caregivers, and as such they are predis-posed to support ethical positions more strongly. Peterson, Rhoads, and Vaught (2001) found that the ethical views of men tend to become more similar to the views of women as they age. If correct, this suggestion would mean that ethical differences held by individuals as stu-dents would tend to decrease once they are in the work environment.
Researchers also have questioned whether business disciplines attract the less ethical students or whether business programs encourage unethical views. Those assumptions have been mostly untested. Curren and Harich (1996) found that students’ discipline of study (either business or humanities) did not play a significant role in their ethical judgments.
Nevertheless, many researchers have found that business degree programs do not seem to instill ethical behaviors in their students (Bunn, Caudill, & Grop-per, 1992; Kumar, Borycki, Nonis, & Yauger, 1991; Peters, 1989; Roderick, Jelley, Cook, & Forcht, 1991; Wolfe, 1993). Most recently, Cole and Smith (1995) found that completion of an ethics course did little to influence the beliefs of a sample of students.
We are left with a mixed bag of results. Although women tend to show more ethical views, the difference diminishes over time. Business students are not necessarily less ethical than their nonbusiness counterparts, but they still show little ethical development while in higher education.
Method
In this study, we surveyed undergrad-uate students at a large, southwestern community college (11,000 students enrolled). We offered surveys to all business students, and a substantial number of nonbusiness instructors pre-sented them to students in their classes.
Students were instructed not to com-plete the survey a second time if they already had completed it in another course. We received a total of 1,146 completed surveys. Because we used only responses that followed the direc-tions (circling correct answers) and omitting handwritten or ambiguous answers, some answers have fewer than the total number of submissions.
Of the 1,146 respondents, 76% were freshmen or sophomores and 41.61% were business majors. The majors were not categorized into specialties because at the community college level there is only a general business degree for most students. A little more than 10% of the students had taken a course in business ethics, and the percentages of male and female students were almost equal. A little over 25% of the students owned stock in a publicly traded company, and a slightly larger group (28.15%) used tobacco. The survey did not ask ques-tions about age, income, or parents’ occupation.
Findings
We gauged students’ attitudes toward business ethics using two questions that mirrored those from the NAS/Zogby poll. We asked students to describe their views on the following statement:
“There are clear and uniform standards of right and wrong by which everyone should be judged.” Students responded on a five-point Likert scale of agree-ment. More than 57% either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement, 26.32% either disagreed or strongly dis-agreed, and 16.64% had no opinion.
We also asked students to describe their views on the following statement: “What is right and wrong depends on individual values and cultural diversity.” Using a five-point Likert scale of agree-ment, 51.77% of the students agreed or strongly agreed, 35.17% disagreed or strongly disagreed, and 13.06% had no opinion.
The findings from our sample appear to contradict those of the NAS/Zogby poll. Thus, our findings support the con-clusion that students believe in uniform standards of right and wrong.
Accounting for Demographic Differences
We wanted to determine if demo-graphic differences could account for the disparity between our results and those of the NAS/Zogby poll. We isolated six factors: gender, tobacco user, stockhold-er, college major, year in school, and whether the student had or had not taken a course in business ethics. (See Tables 1
TABLE 1. Students’ Views on the Statement “There Are Clear and Uniform Standards of Right and Wrong by Which Everyone Should be Judged”
No. of students
Strongly No Strongly
Student subgroup agree Agree opinion Disagree disagree
Men 118 202 82 96 27
Women 87 198 94 117 36
Business majors 94 158 67 86 22
Nonbusiness majors 109 239 109 128 43
Smokers 65 104 39 66 26
Nonsmokers 141 296 135 147 39
Stockholders 65 103 29 49 18
Nonstockholders 139 290 144 161 45
Taken ethics 27 34 18 18 7
Not taken ethics 178 366 158 197 58
Freshmen 61 120 62 62 19
Sophomores 89 181 83 101 27
Juniors 32 60 20 34 11
Seniors 7 18 7 4 2
Combined sample 206 401 177 215 65
and 2 for complete breakdowns of sub-group responses to each question.) For each demographic group, we started with the null hypothesis that there was no dif-ference in beliefs about ethics among the subgroups.
Year in School
Students were divided into the fol-lowing five subgroups: freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, and other. None of the terms were defined within the survey. Freshmen and sophomores accounted for 76% of the total sample, which is not surprising in a community college setting. We found that year in school did not make a significant differ-ence, either on the question regarding the uniformity of right and wrong (x2= 6.445,df= 12,p= .89210117) or on the cultural diversity question (x2= 9.093, df = 12, p = .69496714). Relying on these statistical numbers, we cannot say with any degree of confidence that the year in school made even a modest dif-ference in the student responses.
Two conclusions could be made about this finding. First, one could claim that it supports the thesis that edu-cation does not influence eduedu-cational beliefs. A second and more likely con-clusion is that the very small sample of junior and senior students made any comparison impossible.
Major
For this analysis, we divided students into two groups, business and nonbusi-ness majors. Neither term was defined within the survey. Business majors accounted for 41.6% (461) of the respondents, and nonbusiness majors accounted for 58.4% (647).
Major was not a statistically signifi-cant predictor of attitudes toward busi-ness ethics for either question. In their responses to the question regarding the uniformity of right and wrong, business majors and nonmajors showed little difference (x2 = 4.556, df = 4, p = .33595888). In their responses to the question of whether cultural diversity determines ethics, student major made even less difference (x2= 1.683,df =4, p = .79380333). Thus, we can say with about 20% confidence that choice of major made an extremely small differ-ence in the results. These findings cer-tainly would support the theory that choice of major makes little, if any, dif-ference in attitudes toward business ethics.
Taken an Ethics Course
We asked students to self-report whether they had taken or were taking a course in business ethics. Slightly more than 10.1% (113 respondents) had taken
a course in business ethics, whereas 89.9% (1,002 respondents) had not. Because the course is optional at the associate’s level, the results are not sur-prising. We predicted that this factor would make large differences in atti-tudes toward ethics. We assumed that a course in ethics would make students more aware of these issues and help them formulate appropriate attitudes of business behavior.
The results did not support our pre-dictions at all. On the question regarding uniform standards of right and wrong, the difference between those who had taken business ethics and those who had not was meaningless (x2= 4,df= 4,p= .40600585). Having taken a business ethics course had even less impact on responses to the question regarding cul-tural diversity’s effect on ethics (x2 = 3.542,df= 4,p= .47152096). Accord-ing to these findAccord-ings, there is no evi-dence that taking a business ethics course changed views on ethical busi-ness behavior.
Stockholder
We asked students whether they were stockholders in a publicly traded company. To our surprise, many more students were investors than we had expected. With large numbers of non-traditional students, this should have been expected. Just over one fourth (25.3%) of the students stated that they owned stock (283 respondents), whereas 72.6% (811 respondents) did not.
We obtained a mixed message from our examination of stockholders as a group. We found significant differences between stockholders and nonstock-holders in their views regarding the uni-formity of ethical standards (x2 = 12.275,df= 4,p= .01541927).
However, stockholder status made little difference on student views regarding the cultural diversity ques-tion (x2= 5.42,df= 4,p= .24685155). Although we assumed that the self-interest of the stockholders would make both findings significant, we were surprised to find that only half of these respondents agreed with the statement that cultural context deter-mines ethical standards.
TABLE 2. Students’ Views on the Statement “What is Right and Wrong Depends on Individual Values and Cultural Diversity”
No. of students
Strongly No Strongly
Student subgroup agree Agree opinion Disagree disagree
Men 75 185 72 138 57
Women 77 215 66 137 43
Business majors 58 161 62 111 40
Nonbusiness majors 94 240 75 162 61
Smokers 47 102 53 78 24
Nonsmokers 104 298 86 198 76
Stockholders 34 99 27 81 26
Nonstockholders 113 295 110 192 73
Taken ethics 18 32 15 30 13
Not taken ethics 134 368 125 246 88
Freshmen 49 115 47 81 35
Sophomores 60 196 60 128 42
Juniors 27 55 18 41 16
Seniors 8 12 4 12 2
Combined sample 152 403 140 276 101
Tobacco User
We asked students to identify them-selves as either smokers or nonsmokers. Neither term was defined in the survey. Smokers constituted 28.1% (313) of the sample, and nonsmokers 71.9% (799). We initially predicted no significance resulting from this question. We posed it simply as a demographic question to possibly mislead some respondents regarding the ultimate goal of the sur-vey. To our surprise, the use of tobacco correlated with significant differences in the answers to both questions from the NAS/Zogby poll.
Differences were small but signifi-cant (x2= 10.217,df= 4,p= .03692676) in the responses to the question of whether uniform ethical standards should be used to judge everyone. We obtained similar results when examin-ing the question regardexamin-ing individual values and cultural diversity (x2= 9.6,df = 4,p= .04773253). Thus, we are fairly confident that smoking makes a differ-ence in ethical views. However, the dif-ference is a matter of degree, and it is not valid to claim that smokers are less ethical than nonsmokers or vice versa.
Gender
The students were almost perfectly split between the genders, with 49.3% (525) male students and 50.7% (540) female. Similarly to previous research, we found much more significant results related to gender. Gender seemed to make a difference in the answers to both questions. In both cases, women were slightly more ethical than men.
For the question regarding uniform standards of right and wrong, the results were borderline significant in statistical terms (x2 = 8.856, df = 4, p = .06480132). For the question regarding cultural diversity and ethics, the find-ings were statistically significant (x2 = 4.388,df= 4,p= .3560351).
These findings support the wealth of research indicating that female students tend to have higher ethical views than their male counterparts. Again, it is important to note that the differences are slight and in the same direction for both groups. The difference is a matter of degree of support for ethics, and one
cannot conclude that women are ethical and men are not.
Discussion and Conclusions
These findings would appear to con-tradict the findings of the NAS/Zogby poll. On the issue of students’ belief in uniform standards of right and wrong, our results differ significantly from those of NAS/Zogby. Although those researchers found that only a quarter of the students in their sample thought that there were uniform standards, a majori-ty in our sample (57.05%) supported uniform ethical standards. Controlling for various demographic factors did not change the results.
When we considered demographics, we obtained several important findings. Business and nonbusiness majors had marginally different views, but the dif-ferences, where they existed, were a matter of degree.
Whether a student had taken a busi-ness ethics course does not appear to have exerted as large an effect as expected. We noted modest differences in the views of students who had taken business ethics. One could conclude that ethical training past the primary years does not have any impact. Anoth-er explanation could be that business ethics courses are too theoretical and/or complicated for many under-graduates to comprehend fully. Alter-natively, because we used a very small sample of business ethics students, a few outliers in this group could have possibly had a substantial effect.
Stockholders as a subgroup tended to be more cynical than nonstockhold-ers regarding unethical business prac-tices. We found significant differences in regard to one question. The self-interest of stockholders is the most obvious explanation for this difference. We can surmise that an ethical view may be palatable in theory, but when money is involved, ethical views can change significantly.
Gender was also a factor, in that women were more concerned with ethi-cal behavior than their male counter-parts. This supports the overwhelming majority of research on this topic.
Our unusual finding was that tobacco use had an impact on attitudes toward
business ethics. Although the different attitudes of stockholders can be attrib-uted to pecuniary self-interest, we do not know of any theory that explains how or why smokers as a group would have different attitudes toward business ethics than nonsmokers. Certainly more research is needed in this area.
Implications for Further Research
Several lines of research are possible. First, are our results a product of expo-sure to the media? This survey could be replicated to investigate whether the recent focus on business ethics in media influenced the students’ opinions. Dur-ing the initial study, general media cov-erage of this issue was very great. This attention has declined, and only busi-ness and academic journals presently are dealing with the issue. A change in students’ perceptions over time could show that the survey results reflected concerns generated by the media.
Researchers also should explore the effects, if any, of business ethics courses. Does the business ethics course indoctri-nate students to certain ethical views or not? Because this survey was conducted at a community college, where the busi-ness ethics course is optional, the stu-dents who had taken such a course con-stituted the smallest subgroup. Perhaps, with a larger group of students, differ-ences in beliefs could be found.
Because we had a disproportionate group of freshmen and sophomores, we could not distinguish any changes as the students progressed through the educa-tional system. Sampling in large 4-year schools with more upper level participa-tion could result in significant findings. This was the first study that found any ethical difference between smokers and nonsmokers. Much more work is necessary in this area for determination of an explanation for this finding.
Because we surveyed only American students, another line of research could investigate whether students in other cul-tures or nations in capitalistic countries hold similar views. In addition, because we did not request age and socioeconom-ic data in the original survey, any subse-quent surveys should include those demographic items as well.
The ethical problems of Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco have highlighted the issue of business ethics for the world community. How we choose to use this newfound interest is up to the educators in business ethics. This is our chance to emphasize the real-world implications of what we discuss in class. It would be a shame if we let this opportunity for public interest in busi-ness ethics pass us by.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors wish to thank Lea Ann Hall for her many hours of input on the survey results and John Barker for all of his assistance in the statistical work. Any errors or omissions are solely those of the authors. A previous version of this article was presented to the Academy of Legal Studies in Business National Conference, Nashville, Ten-nessee, August 14, 2003.
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