As project management evolves it is faced with all the challenges of an emerging profession with regard to education, standards of practice and certification, and ethical issues. This paper uses a model of the project managers’ thinking competencies with a special emphasis on ethical thinking as a reference point to develop an approach to teaching practical ethics to project managers. It is proposed that the project management profession has now matured to the point of being willing and able to discuss and debate ethical issues, set ethical standards and guidelines and educate their members in ethics. Although ethics is a highly philosophical and complex discipline it has valuable practical methods to offer the modern project manager.
A new master’s program in project management (MPM) within the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Iceland has three distinct, yet interrelated ways of thinking as the conceptual framework for its curriculum (Fig. 1). These are creative thinking, logical thinking and ethical thinking [1]. While the ability to think creatively and logically has long been recognized as essential to the successful project manager the ethical dimension has not yet been given much attention in the literature.
In this paper, it is proposed that knowledge of and proficiency in thinking about and debating ethical issues is just as important to the modern project manager as are the abilities to think creatively and logically when planning, executing and completing projects. In addition, it is suggested that the core skills area where creativity, logical thinking, and ethical awareness meet and interrelate is the foundation of outstanding project management abilities.
The assumption is that the modern day well educated and responsible project manager must possess the knowledge and skills to be able to discern and debate ethical issues. The question raised is which teaching methods might prove useful to help incorporate the skills of ethical thinking and debating into the project manager’s toolbox.
A comprehensive review of the literature is followed by an action oriented approach where project management assignments of 32 MPM students were investigated before, during and after an intensive course in ethics and leadership.
Ethics can be defined as “the systematic attempt to make sense of individual, group, organizational, professional, social, market and global moral experience in such a way as to determine the desirable, prioritized ends that are worth pursuing, the right rules and obligations that ought to govern human conduct, the virtuous intentions and character traits that deserve development in life, and to act accordingly” [2, p. 42] .
This comprehensive and inclusive definition is both practical and descriptive. Project management is in itself a fairly straightforward process with few mysterious surprises. It is the context of today’s projects that brings complexity into the equation. The context includes the objectives of the project, the stakeholders, the risks, the deliverables, and the effect of the project on people, organizations, environment, politics, power, warfare, equality, freedom and prosperity.
It is suggested here that project managers should be taught to think and debate ethically and that project owners should hire project managers that along with all the important tools of project management, have the ability to explain their ethical standpoint as well as manage the ethics of a situation.
The hypothesis proposed in this paper is that teaching project managers in a very succinct manner to think about the ethics of projects will result in a marked change in the way they view project selection, purpose, risks, stakeholders, goals and outcomes.
The method described in this paper can be viewed as an experiment in giving the ethical dimension in the conceptual framework of creative, logical and ethical thinking a ground to stand on, place of its own. The hypothesis tackled in the paper is that teaching project managers in a very succint manner to think about the ethics of projects will result in a marked change in the way they view project selection, purpose, risks, stakeholders, goals and outcomes. The findings indicate that it seems to be the case.
In terms of strengths and weaknesses it must be acknowledged that this is not a rigorous scientific experiment; it is more of an inductive approach to begin to describe a good way of giving practical, academic ethical training to project managers. Future research possibilities in the fields of quantitative and qualitative research are numerous. One of the most interesting and urgent in this author’s opinion is the development of ethical risk assessment tools for different types of projects.
