Cultivating Ethical Company Culture

IMPORTANT ENROLLMENT NOTE: For this on-demand course, we leverage Instructure's Canvas Catalog. As a part of the registration process you will receive two emails from notifications@instructure.com with important enrollment instructions. Please check your spam folder for these important emails. If you experience any difficulty creating your account and/or enrolling in the course, please contact us at execed@mccombs.utexas.edu.

Cultivating Ethical Company Culture is a two-course program created by the Center for Leadership and Ethics in partnership with Texas Executive Education at the Texas McCombs School of Business. 

This ethics training program provides instruction on the psychological biases, organizational pressures, and situational factors that can cause even the best of us to err. The courses provided offers a foundation in behavioral ethics education to enable both individual employees and entire organizations to become more adept at spotting ethical issues before they arise or blow-up. Lessons learned through this program can help companies design better employee practices and become more adept at dealing with the ethical dilemmas that are an inevitable part of doing business in today’s complex global environment.

Course One – Introduction to Behavioral Ethics

You will learn the fundamentals of behavioral ethics, including how emotions influence our decision making, how the framing of a situation shapes our subsequent decisions and actions, why small slips in ethical behavior are dangerous, and the ways in which our tendency to be self-serving can interfere with our better judgment.

Topics Include:

• Behavioral Ethics
• Moral Emotions Framing Incrementalism
• Self-serving Bias

Course Two – Advancing Integrity in the Workplace

The objective of this course is to develop your understanding of behavioral ethics so you are even more aware of the ways in which your brain can fool you in the moral realm. You will learn about some of the most common biases in the workplace, as well as gain insights into how your brain really operates when it comes to thinking about ethical issues. By becoming aware of the influences described by behavioral ethics research, you can be on the lookout for these potential pitfalls and limit the harmful impact they can have on your choices and actions.

Building on the fundamentals of behavioral ethics from course one, you will learn about moral illusions, rationalizations, and ethical fading. You will also become familiar with the biases often expressed in organizations, such as our tendency to obey authority and to unconsciously adjust our moral compass depending on our role.

Topics Include:

• Moral Illusions
• Rationalizations Conformity Bias
• Obedience to Authority Role Morality
• Ethical Fading