Leadership ethics for STEM students

The WCGE is launching a new cooperation research project to promote ethical competence among potential executives prematurely.

More than two thirds of the executives in Germany have a university degree (DIW Management Monitor 2017). Many of them have studied one of the so-called STEM subjects. At the same time, leadership skills and the associated ethical questions are scarcely found in the module manuals for STEM subjects and are insufficiently made the subject of discussion in their teaching. The project “leadership ethics as an ethics in the science”, which started in January 2019 and was funded by the Carl Zeiss foundation, aims to draw on this gap in the research and to develop a curriculum for imparting this knowledge and the skills that enable students to become good leaders.

The duration of the project is three years. For processing the fundamentally interdisciplinary research tasks, various competences are necessary that must be provided by a methodical, broadly based team. The work is therefore structured in the form of a joint project of the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences (IZEW), the Wittenberg Center for Global Ethics, and the Universities of Mainz and Jena. The task of the WCGE is, together with the IZEW, to develop a basic understanding of leadership ethics as well as the ethical competences derived from it. In addition to the development of concrete curriculum contents, scientific publications on the subject will also be worked out. Jena and Mainz will be responsible for the reconditioning of the didactic mediation of the content as well as its evaluation and will also perform expert interviews that demonstrate the challenges and elements of leadership ethics from a practical perspective.

On February 12 and 13, the kick-off event of the project took place at the International Center for Ethics (IZEW). The next project group meeting will take place in September in Wittenberg.