When Robert Giacalone asked his students at Temple University business school in Philadelphia for examples of morally repellent management behaviour, they struggled to come up with anything. One of his students said: "Well, I suppose you can't kill your subordinates." The class could not agree on anything else they thought was reprehensible.

On another occasion, he asked students whether they would dump carcinogens. On this the class reached consensus: they would do it, because if they did not, someone else would. Prof Giacalone asked whether they wanted to live in such a cynical world. "We already do," they replied.

Prof Giacalone recounts these experiences in the December issue of the Academy of Management's Learning & Education journal as part of an article on who was responsible for producing the leaders of Enron, WorldCom and other scandal-hit companies.

Read whole article on the FT web site.