From the issue dated September 20, 2002
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MBA's Would Rather Quit Than Fight for ValuesBy KATHERINE S. MANGANFaced with a clash between their own values and those of their employers,
That's one of the lessons business schools are unwittingly passing along to students, according to a study by the Aspen Institute's Initiative for Social Innovation Through Business. The nonprofit policy-research group studied nearly 2,200 M.B.A. students from 13 major business schools -- nine from the United States and four from elsewhere -- between the summer of 1999 and the spring of 2001 to determine the students' view of the role that business plays in society, and how their business-school experience has shaped that view. Students who had started their two years of graduate school thinking that a company's top priorities were customer needs and product quality said that by the time they graduated, their own top priority had shifted to "shareholder value." They also said they didn't feel it was possible to change a company's values, and that, faced with a stressful conflict, they'd leave. "There is a flaw in business-school education if students say they will leave a company when faced with a values conflict," says Stephen A. Stumpf, a professor of management at Villanova University. "Business schools are supposed to be training leaders ... teaching them to raise the issues -- not bail out." Among the institutions that participated in the survey were Columbia Business School, the Darden School at the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. The study can be found at http://www.aspeninstitute.org/isib/student_att.html http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 49, Issue 4, Page A15
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education