Paper Authors

Abstract

NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract

The Creation and Validation of Measures for Ethics

In Undergraduate Cross-Functional Teams Abstract This paper is a progress report on the ethics component of a collaborative effort involving team- based project programs at four universities: the IPRO program at Illinois Institute of Technology, the Integrated Product Development program at Lehigh, the Enterprise program Michigan Tech, and the EPICS program at Purdue. The ethics component has the following specific goals: 1) development and validation of instruments to measure ethical proficiency of undergraduate students on multidisciplinary teams; and 2) identifying and developing best practices for creating ethical awareness of the student. Two ethics measures have been developed at IIT and pilot studies started: one presenting ethical situation vignettes with multiple choice answers based on a previously validated method; the other to study ethical climate. These measures have been revised based on initial small pilot studies and are presently being administered at multiple sites.

Introduction Many business organizations have been changing their approach to problem solving from a structure with predominantly mono-disciplinary interaction sequentially with each other to multidisciplinary cross-functional teams who work longitudinally from idea creation to client satisfaction1. Cross disciplinary teams consist of members with different functional experiences and abilities, and will likely come from different departments within the organization. This shift to multidisciplinary teams has created a need for everyone to develop new skills such as communication with fellow members from other disciplines and an awareness of a broader set of ethical principles. Many organizations adopting the cross disciplinary team approach have found it necessary to provide focused employee training to enhance effective team functioning2. Recent work has been done to explore the dimensions that attribute to success in these teams. 3 As colleges and universities became aware of this change, many of them created new courses to better prepare their students to meet these new challenges. The undergraduate equivalent to cross disciplinary teams usually involves students in different academic majors; the extent of academic heterogeneity (e.g., different engineering specialties or including students in engineering, architecture, psychology, business, etc.) varies, and, with that variability, the challenges in teamwork processes – and recognizing ethical issues and determining how to deal with them. Ethical issues may concern the team process itself, or the decisions made about the problem the team is addressing. Faculty who teach the undergraduate team-based courses mentioned above have observed, anecdotally, that many students have a poor grasp of ethical issues that are relevant to their projects.4 This is a progress report on the ethics component of a collaborative effort involving team- based project programs at four universities: the IPRO program at Illinois Institute of Technology, the Integrated Product Development program at Lehigh, the Enterprise program Michigan Tech, and the EPICS program at Purdue. The ethics component has the following specific goals: 1) development and validation of instruments to measure ethical

• Citation

• Format
  • APA
  • APA - LaTeX bibitem
  • MLA
  • MLA - LaTeX bibitem
  • Bibtex
  • EndNote - RIS

May, J., & Gandara, D., & Huyck, M. (2010, June), The Creation And Validation Of Measures For Ethics In Cross Disciplinary Student Teams Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--16747