Measuring Team Ethical Climate: Development of the TECS

The following paper explores the concept of ethical climate in undergraduate interdisciplinary project teams. Ethical climate is formed from the shared perceptions of individuals working in some organization toward the moral situations that occur. At the team level, ethical climate is the shared moral attitudes formed by individuals in a group after working together for some time. The paper introduces a new instrument for ethical climate developed for teams, the Team Ethical Climate Survey (TECS). This measure is based on the Ethical Climate Questionnaire [1], which was formulated around Kohlberg's (1981) cognitive stage theory of moral development. The authors initially proposed eight scales covering the spectrum of team ethics considerations: team interest, laws and codes, personal morality, rules and procedures, self-interest, care, shared ethics, and interdisciplinary professional ethics. These scales include supported scales from the ECQ as well as additional considerations that might be unique to multidisciplinary team decision-making. Initial findings of the TECS, including Cronbach's alpha reliability estimates for each scale are discussed. The authors used a commonly used test development tool, the content validation panel, in which subject matter experts evaluate the overlap between the test and the domain of interest. In the present study, subject matter experts (applied ethicists, engineers, and ethics researchers) evaluated relevance and wording of each test item and suggested several new questions for incorporation. Additional findings and implications for engineering faculty and professionals are provided. This paper presents the results of research to date on the ethics component of a collaborative effort involving team-based project programs at four universities funded by the National Science Foundation under a Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science (TUES) Phase 2 grant.