Will MBA Oaths Mean More Ethical Behavior?

With so much talk about the plummeting value of the MBA brand, it's only natural that graduating students are taking steps to distance themselves from the ethical breaches made by some of their predecessors. At Harvard Business School, more than 20 percent of this year's graduating class has taken an oath to behave with integrity.

As Sean Silverthorne wrote on The View from Harvard Business, the pledge "attempts to mirror oaths taken in other professions such as the Hippocratic Oath in the field of medicine. It is a partial answer to what many see as unethical, unlawful and just plain greedy decisions by business leaders that contributed to the economic crisis."

Despite the pledge's good intention, it has raised a fair amount of controversy so far. Reader responses to a New York Times article about the oath displayed a wide range of emotions.

One reader pointed out that a relatively low number of graduates signed the pledge, saying that "in a field marred by ethics scandal after scandal after scandal, for a mere 20 percent to swear an oath of ethical practice is still embarrassing, even worrisome."

This point raises what is to me one of the inherent problems of the pledge: an assumption that those who don't sign it do so because they want to leave the door open to unethical behavior. As another Times reader mentioned, there are many reasons a graduate may not sign such a pledge:

Isn't it insulting for grown men and women to have to promise that they won't lie, cheat or steal? If young businessmen feel a need to make promises like that, it's an appalling indictment of the management environment they're going into.

Of course, the student organizers are quite familiar with these objections. Max Anderson, one of the creators of the MBA oath, responded in the Times:

Making an oath on graduation day isn't like saying 'abracadabra' and magically everyone is always ethical all of the time. The real test will be the thousands of decisions we make in our careers when we have to put our necks on the line for our values.....Making a marriage vow [isn't] a guarantee that a marriage will stay together. Yet we still believe in the power of marriage vows. A public commitment can be powerful.

Oath image courtesy of Flickr user Swanksalot, CC 2.0