Corporate Integrity

Information

The start of the twenty-first century revealed corporate scandals of perplexing magnitude, such as the Enron, Worldcom, and Parmalat debacles, leaving millions of shareholders and employees financially hurt. Recently, the global banking crisis has further sparked the quest for corporate integrity. Corporate scandals such as these make it clear that business conduct of low integrity hurts the interests of society in many different ways. It has also become increasingly clear that unethical business conduct can rarely be attributed to a few “bad apples” at the top. Instead, unethical behavior is widespread and decision makers at various organizational levels have been found to lack integrity in their leadership.

Integrity issues are integral to management theories, such as stakeholder theory and strategic leadership theory/upper echelons theory. This course helps you to understand the various challenges that leading with integrity implies on a theoretical and practical level. In doing so, we also take on criticisms that have been leveled at these mainstream management theories, such as that they rely on very simplified (and in fact, incorrect) assumptions of what drives human behavior and that they study processes of interest at best in a very indirect way.

The course on corporate integrity gives an in-depth treatment of the processes through which leadership of high integrity can be developed between managers, individual employees, divisions, organizations, and industry sectors. To build a clear understanding of what corporate integrity entails, this course builds on basic leadership and decision-making theories. These models serve as a background to discuss import topics referring to leading with integrity such as ethical leadership, fairness of decision making, whistleblowing, and leadership outcomes like compliance, trust, and financial outcomes. The course addresses leadership efforts to maintain high integrity as well as efforts to repair situations that have been damaged due to actions of low integrity. You will analyze specific cases of corporate misconduct and also conduct empirical research on the processes that underlie such misconduct.

On a practical level, this course will offer you the opportunity to develop skills that allow you to conduct research that is relevant from a practical and at the same time a theoretical point of view and to communicate your findings orally and in writing.

Course organization and teaching methods:
The course consists of five lectures, two feedback sessions, and one presentation session.