Business Leaders and Corporate Responsibility

Thomas R. Piper is trying to establish an appropriate sense of ethics and corporate responsibility for future business leaders. Earlier research provided compelling evidence that many future leaders seriously doubt that their interpersonal ethics can be brought into their professional lives. Their skepticism about the morality of business is coupled with a fear of being perceived to be naive, and their reluctance to challenge misconduct and act on their ethical principles is reinforced by powerful messages transmitted by internal and external financial systems. Piper's research recognizes the importance of profitability in assuring access to capital, continued corporate control, and successful fulfillment of the corporation's traditional role of creating real wealth. But he also recognizes the likelihood that corporations, as dominant institutions in American society, will in the future be expected to provide solutions to increasingly complex national challenges. Moreover, the breakdown of hierarchical organization and decentralization of decision making may require that trust be based on a shared set of ethical principles. Piper's study, part of a larger project (with Carl Kaysen) on the role of the modern corporation in society, is an outgrowth of earlier research on leadership, ethics, and corporate responsibility that yielded a number of teaching cases and the book Can Ethics Be Taught? (coauthored with Mary C. Gentile and Sharon Daloz Parks).