THE ETHICAL VIEWS BUSINESS LEADERS, UNIVERSITY FACULTY AND STUDENTS IN THE UNITED STATES

SELECT YEARS 1983 - 2003
	FINAL DRAFT   BY

Ellen Sutor, Kathleen Casey and

Paul C. Thistlethwaite

Department of Marketing and Finance

Western Illinois University

Research Design Dynamics

Macomb, Il

DEVELOPED FOR THE AMERICAN NATIONAL BUSINESS HALL OF FAME BOARD

November 4, 2004

		TABLE OF CONTENTS
		Contents		Page
SECTION 1:		EXECTUIVE SUMMARY		iv
SECTION 2:		INTRODUCTION AND METHODOLOGY		1
SECTION 3:		BACKGROUND CHARACTERISTICS OF ALL THREE GROUPS		7
SECTION 4:		FOCUS ON ALL 3 GROUPS FOR 2003 ONLY		13
SECTION 5:		FOCUS ON ONLY THE BUSINESS LEADERS FOR 2003		32
SECTION 6:		FOCUS ON ONLY THE FACULTY FOR 2003		44
SECTION 7:		FOCUS ON ONLY THE STUDENTS FOR 2003		55
SECTION 8:		FOCUS ON ALL THREE GROUPS FOR ALL YEARS		67
SECTION 9:		FOCUS ON BUSINESS LEADERS FOR THREE YEARS		93
SECTION 10:		FOCUS ON FACULTY FOR TWO YEARS		109
SECTION 11:		FOCUS ON STUDENTS FOR TWO YEARS		123
SECTION 12:		APPENDICES		137
	APPENDIX A:		FIRST PAGE OF THE EXCEL DATA FILE	138
	APPENDIX B:		1983 BUSINESS LEADER QUESTIONS	141
	APPENDIX C:		2003 BUSINESS LEADER QUESTIONNAIRE	148
	APPENDIX D:		2003 FACULTY QUESTIONNAIRE	151
	APPENDIX E:		2003 STUDENT QUESTIONNAIRE	157

 

List of Tables
	Table	Page
TABLE 2A.	RESPONSE RATES FOR THE THREE BUSINESS LEADER STUDIES.	3
TABLE 2B.	RESPONSE RATES FOR THE TWO FACULTY STUDIES	3
TABLE 2C.	NUMBER OF STUDENTS FROM EACH UNIVERSITY	4
TABLE 2D.	RESPONSE RATES FOR THE TWO STUDENT STUDIES	4
TABLE 2E.	NUMBER OF QUESTIONS ASKED IN EACH SURVEY	5
TABLE 3A.	PERCENT IN EACH GROUP HAVING TAKEN AN ETHICS OR MORAL PHILOSOPHY COURSE	8
TABLE 3B.	DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RESPONDING BUSINESS LEADERS	9
TABLE 3C.	DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RESPONDING FACULTY	11
TABLE 3D.	DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE RESPONDING STUDENTS	12
TABLE 4A.	PERCENT OF EACH OF THE THREE 2003 RESPONDING GROUPS AGREEING WITH EACH STATEMENT   (1=SA;  5=SD)	15
TABLE 4B.	FOR ALL SEVEN YEARS, PERCENT OF EACH OF THE THREE GROUPS PROVIDING THEIR DEGREE OF AGREEMENT WITH EACH STATEMENT (1=SA;  5=SD)	25
TABLE 5A.	PERCENT OF THE BUSINESS LEADERS IN 2003 AGREEING WITH EACH STATEMENT (1 = SA , 5=SD)	34
TABLE 5B.	PERCENT OF THE BUSINESS LEADERS IN 2003 PROVIDING THEIR DEGREE OF AGREEMENT WITH EACH STATEMENT (1=SA;  5=SD)	39
TABLE 6A.	PERCENT OF THE FACULTY IN 2003 AGREEING WITH EACH STATEMENT (1 = SA , 5=SD)	46
TABLE 6B.	PERCENT OF THE FACULTY IN 2003 PROVIDING THEIR DEGREE OF AGREEMENT WITH EACH STATEMENT (1=SA;  5=SD)	50
TABLE 7A.	PERCENT OF THE STUDENTS IN 2003 AGREEING WITH EACH STATEMENT (1=SA;  5=SD)	57
TABLE 7B.	PERCENT OF THE STUDENTS IN 2003 PROVIDING THEIR DEGREE OF AGREEMENT WITH EACH STATEMENT (1=SA;  5=SD)	62
TABLE 8A.	FOR ALL YEARS, PERCENT OF EACH OF THE RESPONDING GROUPS AGREEING WITH EACH STATEMENT (1=SA;  5=SD)	69

TABLE 8B.	FOR ALL SEVEN YEARS, PERCENT OF EACH OF THE THREE GROUPS PROVIDING THEIR DEGREE OF AGREEMENT WITH EACH STATEMENT    (1=SA;  5=SD)	81
TABLE 9A.	FOR EACH OF THE THREE STUDIES, PERCENT OF THE BUSINESS LEADERS AGREEING WITH EACH STATEMENT     (1=SA;  5=SD)	95
TABLE 9B.	FOR EACH OF THE THREE STUDIES, PERCENT OF THE BUSINESS LEADERS PROVIDING THEIR DEGREE OF AGREEMENT WITH EACH STATEMENT (1=SA;  5=SD)	102
TABLE 10A.	FOR EACH OF THE TWO STUDIES, PERCENT OF THE FACULTY AGREEING WITH EACH STATEMENT   (1=SA;  5=SD)	111
TABLE 10B.	FOR EACH OF THESTWO STUDIES, PERCENT OF THE FACULTY PROVIDING THEIR DEGREE OF AGREEMENT WITH EACH STATEMENT (1=SA;  5=SD)	117
TABLE 11A.	FOR EACH OF THE TWO STUDIES, PERCENT OF THE STUDENTS AGREEING WITH EACH STATEMENT   (1=SA;  5=SD)	125
TABLE 11B.	FOR EACH OF THE TWO  STUDIES, PERCENT OF THE STUDENTS PROVIDING THEIR DEGREE OF AGREEMENT WITH EACH STATEMENT (1=SA;  5=SD)	131

SECTION 1: EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

 

 

BUSINESS LEADERS, FACULTY AND STUDENTS’ ETHICAL VIEWS:

 SELECTED YEARS

 1983 – 2003

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This study of business professionals, university faculty and college students provides insights into their ethical beliefs.  Not only can one compare the views of these three groups in late 2003, but the views can be compared to prior studies of the three groups.  Consequently, a very large amount of information has been provided in this report for the reader.  Trying to summarize the important findings will be left to the reader.  People interested in this study will have different perspectives and different research needs.  Please examine the information that you are interested in.  Do write about it.  Only one conference paper has been developed from the data thus far.  The American National Business Hall of Fame board members have received a file copy of this report, the SPSS data file, and an excel file containing results from an additional 189 students from University of Louisiana at Monroe and 84 students from the University of Oregon.  Other persons interested in the data may contact Richard Hattwick for the files at richardhattwick@bellsouth.net or (561) 676-8784

 

SECTION 2:   INTRODUCTION AND   METHODOLOGY

 

BUSINESS LEADERS, FACULTY AND STUDENTS’ ETHICAL VIEWS:

SELECTED YEARS, 1983 TO 2003

 

INTRODUCTION

The Illinois Hall of Fame began an intensive study of ethics in 1983 with a mail survey of randomly selected business leaders of America’s largest 10,000 corporations.  Other studies of other business leaders, university faculty and students were conducted in 1988, 1989 and 1995.  In order to obtain the views of these three groups in 2003, follow-up studies were commissioned by the Board of Directors of the American National Business Hall of Fame. Paul Thistlethwaite, president of Research Design Dynamics and Emeritus Professor of Marketing at WIU worked with two senior students in marketing, Ellen Sutor and Kathleen Casey to conduct the studies.  Several objectives guided the research.  In order to demonstrate these in this report, a strucu8tre was created that will facilitate the appropriate comparisons.

1. To obtain updated information on each of the three groups.
2. To compare the three groups’ opinions in 2003.
3. To compare the 2003 opinions with the earlier four studies.
4. To compare the 2003 business leaders’ opinions with those of 1988 and 1983.
5. To compare the 2003 faculty members’ opinions with those of 1989.
6. To compare the 2003 students’ opinions with those of 1995.

This report will be primarily a statistical report since so many different comparisons of groups are made.   Different persons can use the information to develop professional articles. 

METHODOLGY

In order to obtain the views of business leaders, faculty and students, three different methodologies were employed.  The business leaders and faculty were surveyed using the methodologies of the earlier studies.  The students’ opinions were gathered from several universities instead of just one; the methodology employed in the earlier studies.   The following two sections discuss the actual data collection procedures including response rates and the differences in the questionnaires. 

Business Leaders

The Hall of Fame has conducted three studies of business leaders.  All three surveyed random selections of organizations from the 10,000 largest in the U.S.  A mail survey was employed in each of these.   The appropriate respondent was the chief executive officer or the president.  Others were given the survey to respond to though.  The response rates for these studies are presented in Table 1. 

TABLE 2A.      RESPONSE RATES FOR THE THREE BUSINESS LEADER STUDIES.
	1983 *	1988  **	2003
Population of interest
Number Sent out	700	864	1445
Number of good responses	119	138	66
Response Rate	17	16
Source:      2003 Study of Ethics

*Hattwick, Richard, Bong-Gon P. Shin and Larry C. Wall (1984).  “Business  Ethics- Findings of a Survey of America’s Business Leaders,” Journal of Behavioral Economics, pp. 157-185.

 

**Prasad, Jyoti, Yunus Kathawala, Matthew Monippallil and Richard Hattwick     (1993).  “Business and Academe:  A comparison of Perceptions on Business Ethics,”  The Journal of Socio-Economics, Volume 22, Number 1, pp. 69-83.

The response rate in 2003 was much lower than the other two groups.  In the intervening 15 years, chief executives and presidents have been receiving many more surveys than in the past. This might account for the lower response rate.  The lack of a follow-up postcard might have contributed to it also.  Twice as many surveys were sent out this time as in the past so a follow-up postcard would not be necessary. This was not an accurate assumption.  A follow-up postcard would probably have been more effective.

Faculty

In both 1989 and 2003, university faculty were contacted by sending a letter to the Dean of a college of business and asking him or her to complete the survey and also ask three other faculty to respond.  All of the selected colleges in 2003 were members of the AACSB.   A follow-up postcard was sent out three weeks after the initial survey was mailed.  This was too apparently too long of a time period to elapse to be effective.  A problem also did arise with this survey that may have contributed to a lower response rate.  Some of the faculty received questions that inadvertently had been printed with the student demographic questions rather than the faculty demographic ones.  All of the deans received the correct version.

 

*Monippallil, Matthew, Yunus Kathawala, Richard Hattwick, Larry Wall and Bong-Gon P. Shin, (1999).  “Business Ethics in America:  A View From the Classroom,“ The Journal of Behavioral Economics, Volume 19, Number 1, pp.  125-140.

Students

The students in the 1995 study were college of business students from Eastern Illinois University.  In order to obtain a wider perspective of students’ ethical attitudes, faculty from the American National Hall of Fame were invited to participate in the collection of student data at their university.  A few other selected faculty were also invited to participate.  By January 10, 2004, a total of 1009 good questionnaires were returned for processing and analysis.  An additional 84 were provided by Simona Stan at the University of Oregon.  Jerry Wall at University of Louisiana at Monroe collected 189 surveys from his university.  They were received in February and could not be included in the first version of this report.  Redoing the many, many tables to include their data was beyond the scope of this study.  They, however, will be part of the database that faculty can use to develop professional articles.   The students attended college at a private university, several regional universities and two flagship universities.   Table 2C presents the listing of the universities that participated and the number of students surveyed at each.   Table 2.E gives information about the number of students in each of the two studies.


                        Source:    2003 Study of Ethics

 *Not included in this report.


                                      Source:                  2003 Study of Ethic 

* Prasad, Jyoti, Nancy Marlow and Richard Hattwick (1998).     
“Gender-BasedDifferences in Perception of a Just Society, “ Journal of Business Ethics, Volume 17, pp. 219-  228.

QUESTIONNAIRE

The researchers thought the questionnaire would be the easiest part of the research process.  They were mistaken.  This part of the research became a very complicated part.  The studies from 1983 to 1995 did not include the same questions for all studies nor was the wording of the “same” question exactly the same.  Some of the differences were unintentional.  For example, the wording of the questions in the report for the 1983 study had slightly different wording for some of the questions that had been on the questionnaire.   All questions from the studies were entered into an Excel spreadsheet so that a visual examination of the questions could be made. Anyone interested in looking at this spreadsheet should contact Paul.  The first page of the spreadsheet is given as Appendix A.  Consequently,  in most instances, the most recent wording was used. 

Also, in doing all of the investigation of the wording of the questions, an error was made in the current study.  In the previous studies, a five-point Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree scale had been utilized with No Opinion being the midpoint for most of the questions.  In the 2003 survey, questions 30 to 38 were to have had the Influence set of answers.  But the Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree set of answers was mistakenly used instead. The possible answers should have been “Extensive Influence, Some Influence, No Opinion, Little Influence and No Influence.” Therefore, the extent of influence can be gained by interpreting a questions such as “To what extent are ethical standards of business executives influenced by peer group pressure?” as “Peer Group pressure influences the ethical standards of business executives” with the degree of agreement being the possible answers. 

Table 2.F gives the number of questions asked of each group for each survey.  The first survey in 1983 had 93 questions.  All three of the 2003 questionnaires had approximately 50 questions, instead of more questions, to try to increase response rate.

 

                            Source:    2003 Study of Ethics

 

One of the major goals for the 2003 study was to keep the survey to no more than two pages, plus a cover letter.  Also, the same attitudinal questions were to be asked of all three groups in 2003.  Consequently, a review of the questions that had been asked ALL three groups from 1983 to 1995 revealed that only 29 had been asked of business leaders, faculty and students.  These became the first 29 questions on the 2003 survey.  Then, nine questions that had been asked of both the business leaders and the faculty were included.  These were the infamous “influence” questions that need to be reinterpreted from the original wording of the questions.  The last nine questions had been asked of both business leaders and students.  There were NO questions included on the 2003 questionnaires that had been asked of only one group.  The demographic questions were changed for the three groups.  Note that some of the faculty received a survey that had student demographics.  For those instances, the information concerning having taken an ethics course and gender was still recorded for the faculty.

As indicated above, the seemingly relatively simple updating of the ethical views of three groups became complex since three different research designs had to be employed.  Also, the original 84-attitudinal questions had to be analyzed for consistency in wording in subsequent surveys.  Other ethical questions were added to the faculty survey.  All subsequent surveys had no more than 48 attitudinal questions.  Therefore deciding what to ask became a somewhat complex question.   The research team consulted with Dick Hattwick concerning which form of the question should be used.  The questionnaires for the business professionals, faculty and students are provided in Appendices B to E.

METHOD OF ANALYSIS

Given the complexity of the research design and the relatively few questions that had been asked of all three groups in earlier studies, the analysis therefore became a little more complex.   Only 29 of the 47-attitudinal questions had been asked of all three groups in earlier studies. Therefore, the tables of analysis in this study had to accommodate the other 18 questions.  The research team tried to make the tables of information as consistent and easy to use as possible.  When a question was Not Asked of a particular group, then a NA was entered into the table.  For the students in the 1995, some of the information asked on the survey was not presented in the journal article.  Therefore, a NI for No Information (but asked) was included on the tables.   For this current study, any nonresponse for the attitudinal questions was coded as a 3 for “No Opinion.”

Because there is so much information to be presented, the tables were segmented into logical sections.  Also, within each section, where possible, a more summary like table with the question, the year, the group, the percent who agreed, the average response, the standard deviation and the number of respondents is presented.  The second table, where possible, presents the percentage of respondents who gave each of the Agreement answers.

SECTION 3: BACKGROUND CHARACTERISTICS OF  ALL THREE GROUPS

 

 

BACKGROUND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BUSINESS LEADERS, FACULTY AND STUDENTS

 

INTRODUCTION

 

The background characteristics of each of the three groups for 2003 will be presented.  A comparison to the earlier respective demographics will also be given.  The question on ethics is presented before the demographics.  The characteristics of the business leaders, faculty and students will then be discussed.

Although not a demographic question, the question concerning haven taken an ethics class, its information is presented in this section.   Table 3A reveals that business leaders were more likely to have taken the ethics course than the current college of business students.  The students were the least likely to have had such a course.

DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS

 

BUSINESS LEADERS

As shown in Table 3B, in 2003 an overwhelming percentage of the respondents were male, 92%.  Even though Best Lists of Arizona randomly selected the sample of large companies, none of the respondent’s companies employed more than 900 persons.  The average was in the 700 range.  The two states with the largest number of respondents were California and Illinois, 14% and 11%.   Almost half of the respondents were CEO’s, in the service sector and had a management and marketing background. 

The percentage of respondents in 1983 identifying themselves as CEO’s was very close to the 2003 percentage.  No information was reported in the 1988 article about business leaders.