The article Promises Aren’t Enough by Rodrigo Canales, B. Cade Massey and Amy Wrzesniewski has been published on 22 of August 2010 in the Sloan Management Review periodical. Authors of the article, Rodrigo Canales and B. Cade Massey, are assistant professors of organizational behaviour of Yale University’s School of Management, and Amy Wrzesniewski who is an associate professor of organizational behaviour at Yale’s School of Management; their article is devoted to the question of M.B.A. business leaders training in ethical spheres.
The question under analyses presented in the article concerns a problem of future M.B.A. graduates training. Graduates of business school give a vow that implies great ethical meaning. Students promise to “serve the greater good” (Canales, Massey, & Wrzesniewski, 2010); still, contemporary world does not percept a successful businessman as an ethical leader. Students of business schools often pass through various polls devoted to the question of choosing beneficial qualities of a business world representative. Answering questions of the survey, they often single out such features as vision and business acumen leaving responsibility and honesty lower in the list. At the same time, they choose ethical values when features of an attractive and respectable human personality are under discussion. Authors are afraid, that words of oath are indeed just words for leading business schools new students and graduators. They do not feel what these words mean, and do not fully understand responsibility that the vow lays on them. They are not insincere, they are just inadequately trained.
Still, they will need much more than vow words, when they will face the necessity to take responsible decisions, mostly in stressful conditions.
This lesson has been implicated in one scandal after another, from Enron to Abu Ghraib. Pledges made without the benefit of experience with compromising situations, and without some kind of supporting structure, actually exacerbate the problem. (Canales, Massey, & Wrzesniewski, 2010)
There is no unanimous point of view concerning schools’ role in this question. Still, authors of the article believe that schools can take part in managing this problem if they will partially refocus their educational programs. Science rapidly develops, and people get used to rely on analytics; still, analytics fails to cope with ethical questions. Though M.B.A. programs indeed cover problems of ethics and leadership, it is held in a one-sided way. An accent is made on social influence and public speaking for leadership courses and legal aspects for ethics courses. “This leaves the connection between values, leadership and action underdeveloped” (Canales, Massey, & Wrzesniewski, 2010). A real leader, authors tell, is to think about long-term consequences, but not about present and momentary profit.
Nothing can substitute experience, say authors, and offer implementation of experiential learning programs to overcome this problem. If students graduate from their educational establishment being unfamiliar with the situations where they may be engaged into a reprehensible behavior they will be vulnerable to ethical breaches in real life. Moreover, when alumni face conflicts with their moral values they are often isolated from each other. The authors claim to straighten alumni network in order to avoid situations, in which graduates will have to “make their hardest choices alone” (Canales, Massey, & Wrzesniewski, 2010).
The article covers important and topical problems. A question of leaders’ behavior in critical situation often concerns not only leaders’ face; reputation of a firm or an enterprise also depends on its leader’s reactions. Andrew Griffin, the author of a research book New Strategies for Reputation Management: Gaining Control of Issues, Crises & Corporate Social Responsibility, published in 2008, speaks about necessity to keep face in difficult situations. The author describes a reaction of BP Company head, Lord Browne, to the explosion case on the Refinery in Texas City, 2005. Right after the accident the head of the company with spotless reputation came to the place of the accident and spoke to the press. Lord Browne expressed his sympathy for the families of injured and deceased and promised to pay a huge sum of “fair compensation” without any necessity for litigation. His speech and further behavior prevented the failure of company’s reputation in public eyes for a considerable time. Though many unethical actions inside BP structure were later found, Lord Browne managed to substantially soften public reaction and bought a lot of time for the company (Griffin, 2008, pp. 86-89).
At the same time, the reasons of the explosion were also connected with the role of management that may be also taken under consideration in the movement of a problem under Promises Aren’t Enough article analyzes. OHS expert Professor Andrew Hopkins tells about BP managerial failure in his book Failure to Learn the BP Texas City Refinery Disaster research, published in 2008. The startup that led to the explosion was fulfilled without any authorization as long as communication between subordinates and managers was practically equal to zero. While managers at the previous meeting had decided to put off the startup they had not said about it to workers of the Refinery and they initiated the procedure as it was planned beforehand. While managers were expected to fulfill their direct leading duties they failed to do it in the most irresponsible way (Hopkins, 2008, p. 19). Similar problems happened on other enterprises of BP Company. One can surely find many other examples of managerial incompetence in contemporary history. Thereby, the problem, described in the article is indeed a sign of our time. Still, the article covers only theoretical aspects of the problem, and offers only general theoretical direction on how to achieve its solution. At the same time, measures offered in the article are not necessarily able to cope with the problem investigated, as long as behavior in business world is ruled by aptitude. Nevertheless, doing nothing means achieving nothing.
The article Promises Aren’t Enough by Rodrigo Canales, B. Cade Massey and Amy Wrzesniewski deals with ethical nature of managers’ works. Very often managers face the choice between ethical and unethical actions; at the same time, there may be not solution that would be appropriate for all sites indulged into the problem. Nevertheless, as Gibson, Ivancevich, Donnelly, and Konopaske write in the book Organizations: Behavior, Structure, Processes, 13th Edition, published in 2009, “the nature of managerial work is then to coordinate the work of individuals, groups and organizations by performing four management functions: planning, organizing and controlling” (Gibson, Ivancevich, Donnelly, & Konopaske, 2008, p. 15). There may be some additional aims depending on circumstances, but these four tasks refer to direct duties of a manger. At the same time, managers’ actions cannot be unethical. Their work is intended to interactions with people, and effective interaction is possible on the base of building ethical and mutually respectful relationships. Nevertheless, as we see from the examples, given above, managers sometimes fail to fulfill these duties. Moreover, the reasons of their failure lie much deeper than many people think.
Education of moral values is a matter of family care. Still, when a respectful school trains its graduates it must be aware of hardships that they may face. Their failures influence their educational establishments as well. Managers may become unable to organize effective performance if they are not ready to act in stressful situations. Still, they also should be ready to keep feeling of responsibility to their superiors and inferiors no matter under what pressure they are at the moment. As long as leading tasks presupposes “day-to-day interactions between managers and their subordinates” (Gibson, Ivancevich, Donnelly, & Konopaske, 2008, p. 17), a negative example, presented by a manger may cause a substantial harm to the whole task he/she is responsible for. “As for every level, managers of organizations have the primary responsibility for attaining effective performance” (Gibson, Ivancevich, Donnelly, & Konopaske, 2008, p. 18).
However, what is effective performance and if ethics questions are its components? It is obvious, that managers should favor the development of healthy atmosphere of a team that is under his/her responsibility. It is highly important to ensure effective performance. Still, there is another task managers often work on. It is a question of saving company’s face. When a reputation of a company is high, consumers’ demand increases as well. At the same time, it becomes more prestigious to work on such firm or company. Performance increases. As long as managers represent their teams their actions should be ethical at least to secure fair competition and keep company’s face in public opinion. Still, inexperienced graduates may not feel all nuances of the question under investigation. Moreover, negative outer examples gradually, step by step destroy their moral and ethical conviction. Thereby, there is necessity to implement ethical trainings for future managers on all levels of their education.
References
Canales, R., Massey. B. C., & Wrzesniewski, A. (2010). Promises Aren’t Enough. Sloan Management Review. Web.
Gibson, J. L., Ivancevich, J. M., , Donnelly, J., & Konopaske, J. R. (2008). New York: McGraw-Hill.
Griffin, A. (2008). New Strategies for Reputation Management: Gaining Control of Issues, Crises & Corporate Social Responsibility. London: Kogan Page Publishers.
Hopkins, A. (2008).Failure to Learn the BP Texas City Refinery Disaster. Sydney: CCH Australia Limited.