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This chapter examines the integration of Giving Voice to Values (GVV) into an accounting ethics course. GVV has received a great deal of interest by business educators in the past decade and, more recently, by those accounting faculty who teach accounting ethics in a standalone course or as part of another course. This chapter describes GVV assumptions and principles that are helpful for any faculty considering adopting GVV. After a brief review of different instructional approaches for teaching accounting ethics, GVV literature relating to accounting ethics is examined. The integration of GVV builds on the Kelly (2017) integration of leadership topics in an accounting ethics course and synergistically promotes moral motivation and moral character that contributes to ethical behavior. To facilitate the integration efforts, this chapter presents specific learning objectives, GVV background materials, case recommendations, and application/assessment approaches. This chapter concludes with a discussion of GVV and its possible role in assurance of learning efforts.

This chapter assesses the impact of values change on the likelihood of reporting concerns for a situation of fraudulent financial reporting after a Giving Voice to Values (GVV) ethics intervention. The GVV curriculum shifts focus away from why actions are unethical to how one may effectively voice their values to resolve ethical conflict. After implementing this program in advanced accounting courses and empirically assessing the impact of the ethics intervention, the authors find that students have a stronger sense of the importance of values prescribed in professional codes of conduct and are more likely to speak up and confront unethical actions by voicing their values. GVV has the potential to increase the number of accounting professionals who are willing to speak up and confront unethical practices. The authors’ study appears to be the first to empirically test how a change in the perception of the importance of values impacts the likelihood to report concerns to members of the management hierarchy, filling an important gap in the literature.

The Giving Voice to Values (GVV) program takes a unique approach to ethics education by shifting the focus away from a philosophical analysis of why actions are unethical to a focus on how individuals can effectively voice their values to resolve ethical conflict. The authors explore how peer feedback and peer assessment, when implemented within a GVV module, can increase students’ understanding of ways to resolve ethical dilemmas, increase student engagement, and increase confidence in confronting unethical actions. The findings indicate that the use of peer feedback and assessment increases students’ understanding of ways to resolve ethical dilemmas, increases confidence in confronting unethical actions, and student attitudes suggest that assessing peers is a way to learn from each other and enhances interaction/engagement of students in the course. The teaching methods described in this study can easily be implemented in any specific discipline or accounting ethics course.

We present a peer-to-peer teaching approach designed to prepare introductory accounting students to address ethical challenges they will face in the workplace. We describe the motivation, processes, and resources used, introduce an effectiveness measure and discuss refinements so that other universities may adopt the innovation.

Upper division Beta Alpha Psi (BAP) accounting honor society members, with faculty guidance, create and deliver workshops in the 200-level introductory accounting sequence using the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) curriculum. GVV provides tools to move from recognition to action when confronted with a values conflict. The BAP members had completed the GVV exercises and casework in their upper division accounting courses. Now as peer coaches, they guide sophomore-level business students through the GVV curriculum to prepare them to act on their values when challenged.

Post-training perceptions express consistent beliefs that the introductory accounting students’ skills and abilities had improved with the training. Additionally, introductory accounting students’ descriptions of how they would address values conflicts based on what they learned in the training reflects development of personalized specific approaches.

GVV provides students with an action-based ethics toolkit to build upon as they move forward academically and professionally. The peer-to-peer innovation builds stronger mentor and mentee ties and introduces the business program’s ethical culture to sophomore-level business students.

The innovation won the 2014 Beta Alpha Psi Ethics Award sponsored by Grant Thornton and reflects the first use of a peer-to-peer approach with GVV in a university setting.

This chapter explores practical wisdom’s role in managing the application and use of soft skills. The authors explore how practical wisdom can connect technical and soft skills by developing moral skill and moral will to enhance ethical decision-making. Given practical wisdom’s importance, the authors further examine its role in the experiential learning process and how experiential learning activities like the Giving Voice to Values (GVV) curricular offering can bring practical wisdom and soft skills into the classroom with modest effort and investment. Through the application of the GVV methodology to a case study, the authors demonstrate how practical wisdom can be used in accounting education to support and advance accounting students’ moral and skill development, and accounting educators looking to do so can use this chapter as a starting point.

This paper examines the linkages between the ethics and management control literatures and suggests some potentially fruitful areas for future research and for integration in the classroom.

We review topics in the ethics and management control literatures organizing them around the six modules used in the accounting ethics course taught at the University of Southern California: (a) professional standards, (b) distinguishing right from wrong, (c) understanding why (good) people do bad things, (d) getting employees to behave ethically (corporate ethics programs), (e) getting people to speak up when they see something wrong taking place (Giving Voice to Values), and (f) whistleblowing (the last resort).

While we find many topics where ethics and management control are concerned with similar issues, there are very few papers that approach these topics from the two perspectives.

We provide an overview of topics where ethics and management control overlap, and highlight the need for greater convergence between the two literatures. By linking MCS and ethics, organizations can provide a framework to promote behavior that both contributes to the achievement of the organization’s objectives and also follows ethical principles. We comment on what may happen when ethics and management control diverge, and discuss controls that can promote a strong ethical climate.

As organizational misconduct, fraud and abuse increasingly make news headlines, public opinion is hardening against organizations that engage in illegal or unethical practices. Regulators are now acknowledging whistleblowers as frontline watchdogs, while governments are legislating to protect employees who report illegitimate conduct. However, many organizations are out of step: punishing or ignoring employees who speak up. These organizations run the risk that bad behaviour goes unchecked and that internal whistleblowers take their concerns outside the organization, creating reputational damage and potential legal ramifications. We argue that companies need to get back in step with society by encouraging employee voice as an early internal warning system to detect organizational misconduct. A five-step action plan is presented to enable management to create an ethical environment that encourages, trains and rewards employees to speak up openly about ethical concerns.

A proposed typology of moral exemplars in business highlights instances selected to illustrate standards for inclusion. The typology distinguishes among champions, heroes, and saints as different kinds of business exemplars. The typology reflects variations in both specific decision conditions and moral value emphases of business actors. The typology also differentiates moral exemplars from moral neutrals (i.e., amoral actors) and moral sinners (i.e., moral value scofflaws). The objective is to advance understanding of moral character and moral courage in business settings.

The methodology combines original conceptual argument and brief case summaries taken from available literature. The chapter is not a systematic survey of literature but cites key works. Construction of the typology involved iteration between conceptual development and case interpretation.

The chapter separates business cases into private business and public business, and applies Adam Smith’s distinction between citizenship and good citizenship. An additional distinction is made between extreme conditions and normal conditions. Moral heroism in business is restricted to life-and-death or strongly analogous situations in extreme conditions such as hazardous whistleblowing. Moral sainthood in business involves extreme maximization of a single value going far beyond simple compliance with legal requirements and typical ethical norms – Smith’s definition of citizenship. Moral championing in business concerns some degree of lesser self-sacrifice in defense of important values reflecting Smith’s definition of good citizenship.

The chapter is a selection of literature undertaken in iteration with the conceptual development effort. The original research aspect of the chapter is thus quite limited. The author is not positioned to judge the accuracy of published information, for or against a particular instance. The classifications thus depend on whether the instance would, if the generally reported facts are basically accurate, serve as a reasonable illustration of standards for inclusion. Criticisms have been made concerning some of the instances discussed here.

The emphasis is on providing standards for defining moral exemplars for business to suggest how much can be accomplished in business through moral influence.

The conceptual contribution is original, although drawing on the philosophical literature debate about saints and heroes. The chapter treats exemplar as the overarching construct, separated into three kinds: heroes, saints, and champions. Sinner is implicit in the notion of saint. The chapter adds moral champions and moral neutrals to isolate moral heroism. The cases exist in the literature, but have been combined together here for the first time.

One defining characteristic of service-learning as a pedagogical tool is its focus on reflection. Within service-learning programmes, students engage collaboratively with one another and community members, and are encouraged to reflect on the various aspects of their experience. The author argues that reflection is crucial for its contribution to service-learning, as a teaching methodology, and to service-learning’s cognitive, affective and social impact. Part of service-learning’s impact is its contribution to the development of inclusive attitudes and predispositions towards inclusiveness among school students and tertiary students, particularly pre-service teachers. The chapter recognises inclusivity as an element of quality teaching that helps students make connections with contexts outside the classroom, engage with different perspectives and ways of knowing and to accommodate all their peers and all those being offered service. The chapter recommends a particular approach to the expansion of thinking and practice that inclusivity requires, one based on the methodology of the Philosophy in Schools movement, which has its genesis in the work of John Dewey. That approach uses the mechanism of the Community of Inquiry to structure reflective activities in a way that facilitates the development of students’ critical and creative thinking and their capacity for substantive dialogue. Within the Community of Inquiry students are encouraged to engage with differing and perhaps novel perspectives as they respond to real-life service-learning experiences. Well-facilitated reflection gives students the opportunity to develop skills and dispositions conducive to deep understanding of concepts and issues that arise in discussion. It also helps to raise awareness of preconceptions and attitudes that can undermine inclusiveness in education. The chapter draws the conclusion that rigorous reflection serves as a stimulus to act to implement inclusive practices within service-learning projects on the basis of well-justified reasoning.

Developing self-awareness as a management instructor and modelling this process for students’ similar awareness has benefits in classroom learning environments. In this chapter, the authors reframe faculty and student traditional roles and responsibilities, providing an iterative, holistic process of embedded interdependent self-awareness development where students experience a sense of empowerment and control over their learning, integral to mutual success. The authors’ experiences draw on aspects of experiential learning, Gestalt psychology, and self-determination theory (SDT). To create an intrinsically motivating, student-centred learning environment in an undergraduate leadership course, the authors reframed teaching to include course design, opportunities for student autonomy, co-creation of psychological safety, and the instructor’s use of self. This evidence-based reflection for self-awareness included examining behavioural patterns, feelings, and thinking. Finally, the authors discuss lessons learned and practical applications, identifying reflexivity, psychological safety, iterative feedback, student autonomy, and modelling as key to the process.