The Total Integrity Management Approach to Professional Ethics
This will be our first in-person event in over a year. The day will begin with lunch at noon and then Professor Fort will begin his remarks at 12:30 pm. Below is an outline and description of his talk.
The Total Integrity Management Approach to Professional Ethics
Timothy L. Fort, PhD, JD
Eveleigh Professor of Business Ethics
Professor of Business Law & Ethics
Kelley School of Business
Segment 1: Hard Trust
At a minimum, professional, ethical conduct pays attention to external and internal rules. Those external rules entail compliance with laws as well as to the coercive enforcement mechanism of public opinion. This segment provides studies of what works and what doesn’t work in integrating compliance with the workplace.
Segment 2: Real Trust
Perhaps the Holy Grail of business ethics is “good ethics is good business.” This segment looks at the empirical literature that suggests that there is some truth to this, but the specifics are a bit more complex. It also looks at a survey conducted by the presenter and his co-author that looks at what 20 CEOs (half from the US and half from Europe) believe are the key factors for creating an ethical culture in which good ethics is organizationally rewarded.
Segment 3: Good Trust
Laws and incentives go so far to encourage ethical conduct. If companies and the individuals in them don’t care about conducting themselves ethically, then laws and incentives tend to fail. This segment looks at three sources, rooted in evidence found in neurobiological studies, that can nudge individuals and companies to, indeed, care about ethics.
Segment 4: Matching Psychological Mindset to Ethical Orientation
This segment is based on very new research that maps psychological models of moral development with contemporary “cultural artifacts” (especially music) to provide a mechanism for individuals to find ways to cognitively orient themselves to make ethical decisions. Thus, participants walk out with tools that help to orient them to face daily decisions.
