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International Journal of Servant-Leadership

Abstract

Despite the fact that it has been ten years since scandals such as Enron, WorldCom, and Adelphia, accountability and ethical leadership issues in business organizations continue to occur. Legislative and regulatory compliance mandates such as Sarbanes Oxley have not stemmed some of these ethical breaches. Recent examples include the Madoff, Rothstein, and Stanford Ponzi schemes and the mortgage-backed securities perpetration that has rocked world markets. As a result, corporations are under renewed pressure from regulators, stockholders, and stakeholders to demonstrate that they have a moral conscience. In response to this pressure, some companies, whether they have been caught cheating, lying, or making bribes, have turned to hiring a compliance or ethics chief, what some call an integrity tsar, to assure stockholders and stakeholders that the company has recovered its moral compass (Clegg 2011 ). An interesting set of statistics, supporting the view that society as a whole is calling for principle-based leadership instead of rule-based strategies is published each year at the World Economic Forum's annual meeting. According to this report, Edelman's Trust Barometer Findings, which has been produced for the last thirteen years, United States business leaders have descended into the distrusted category (Edelman 2011/2012). Edelman, a public relations firm, conducts survey research that assesses the level of trust that stakeholders have in an organization, an industry, and a leader. The 2013 report identifies the source of the greatest percentage of distrust in a business organization is based upon the perception of business organizations as corrupt and fraudulent; furthermore, the percentage of distrust in the business was found to be thirty-two points greater than trust in the business leaders to be truthful (2013). This research pinpoints that the most valuable asset an organization and its leaders can possess is the trust of those they serve, identifying the attributes of trust as: engagement, integrity, products and services, purpose, and operations (2013). The pressure for businesses to reset their moral compass has also been directed at business schools. After every accounting scandal, business schools are called upon to teach potential future business leaders and employees not only quantitative skills of finance and economics but also critical reasoning and ethical decision making (Adler 2002; Felton and Sims 2005; Jacobs 2009). In response to this pressure, there has been an increase, in the last ten years, in the number of top global business schools who have added an ethics training component to their curricula. In addition, the teaching of ethical standards and learning outcomes is required by business school accrediting bodies. However, the recent ethical breaches raise the question as to whether business schools, specifically through their MBA curricula, have done enough to instill a moral and ethical compass in these future business leaders. Moreover, some critics of MBA curricula believe that business schools are detrimental to society, by fostering selfcentered behavior (Aspen Institute 2006; Jacobs 2009; Podolny 2009). This article aims to explore this criticism of MBA curricula by addressing the following questions: (I) Have business schools failed to teach corporate governance? (2) What are the principles of corporate governance and the role of trustees in the increasingly complex business landscape? (3) How do business educators introduce the topic of corporate governance and the role corporate board members and trustees play in society into MBA curricula? (4) What value do the insights of Robert K. Greenleaf regarding trusteeship and servant-leadership lend to an MBA curriculum? and (5) How does John Carver's Policy Governance Model inform teaching corporate governance?

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