| The prominence of ethical scandals in business in recent years has been a major cause for alarm within the profession. Public trust in business has dropped to disastrous lows (Swanson, 2004) and businesses have realized that poor ethics are detrimental to their bottom line. Although attempts are being made to effectively respond to the situation, the literature has called for more effective business ethics education at the undergraduate level. The present situation has left schools of business "scrambling to develop a response" (Felton & Sims, 2005).;The business literature frequently references Kohlberg's theory of moral development in conceptualizing the situation; however, no research studies to date have evaluated educational interventions aligning this particular theory to educational design. Deliberate Psychological Education (DPE) is grounded by the assumptions of Cognitive Developmental Theory and DPE-based interventions have been empirically validated as effective means for promoting developmental growth: cognitive, moral, ego, and conceptual in a multitude of settings.;The primary directional hypothesis for this study suggested that the business undergraduate students involved in a DPE-based intervention within their ethics course would show an increase in their ethical reasoning abilities during the course of the semester, in comparison to the control group. The Defining Issues Test-II (DIT-II) and the Multidimensional Ethics Scale (MES) were utilized as pre-test and post-test measurement tools. The statistical analyses for the DIT-II clearly supported this hypothesis while the MES findings did not show a significant difference. |
