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Faculty Research
Since its inception, the David Berg Center for Ethics and Leadership has sought to explore the interface between ethics and leadership, emphasizing the interdependence between these two concepts. It supports the idea that both leadership and ethics are necessary for effective decision making and for defining and executing the mission or vision of an organization.
As part of the Berg Center's mission, we support groundbreaking research that contributes to the integration of theory and best practice on leadership and ethics in organizations. We are pleased to invite the faculty of the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business to submit proposals for funding of such research by the Berg Center.
Questions regarding research can be directed by e-mail to Barry Mitnick, the Berg Center's director of faculty research.
Research Focus
The research program is aimed at developing new understandings about the behavioral patterns and management practices associated with ethics and the interface between ethics and leadership in organizations. The research problems in these areas are viewed from a systems perspective, with researchers seeking to understand the complex and sometimes indirect and subtle effects that generate ethics dilemmas and undesirable organizational and societal outcomes. Thus, study must address a wide spectrum of management, governance, organization design, infrastructure, individual decision-making, and practice issues. The center's research emphasizes an "engineering" approach, in which understanding of the behavior of organizational systems is sought in order to design structures, practices, and interventions that result in stable, desirable organizational and societal outcomes.
At present, the research thrusts of the center focus on the following areas:
- the agency (as in agent-principal) and system design issues surrounding the production of desirable organization practices with especially high reliability, and the avoidance of undesirable ones
- the behaviors and management practices associated with positive and negative reputations
- the measurement of ethics infrastructure, including the evaluation of the performance of ethics education
- the design of tools or instruments to measure ethical performance
- the understanding of the functions of role modeling in generating ethical behavior
- ethics risk analysis
Current RFPs
At present, the Berg Center is accepting proposals for general research into business ethics and leadership and proposals for research evaluating our CPLE program.
Template for Published Research Supported by the Berg Center
The Berg Center requests that all presented or published work supported at least in part by the Berg Center carry the following acknowledgement: "We wish to acknowledge the support of the David Berg Center for Ethics and Leadership in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh, which provided a grant for this research."
In addition, the Berg Center would greatly appreciate receiving copies of all papers presented and/or published with at least partial support of the Berg Center.