(TV statics) ♪ Thank you for being a friend - [Jason] Just the opening notes.

♪ Travel down the road and back again ♪ - [Jason] And you know what it is.

♪ Your heart is true ♪ Your a pal and a confidant - [Jason] The 1980s classic "The Golden Girls," the critically acclaimed primetime Emmy Award winner for Outstanding Comedy series.

Looking back, what's kind of interesting is the four ladies starring in the show weren't really that old.

Three of the actresses were in their early '60s and Rue McClanahan who played Blanche was just 52.

That's a stark contrast from the actresses of today, like 54-year-old Jennifer Lopez, 55-year-old Jennifer Aniston, 59-year-old Sandra Bullock and Michelle Pfeiffer, who at 65 is older than all the Golden Girls were when the show premiered.

Put a modern day hairstyle on Alice from "The Brady Bunch" and you see the difference.

Call it the new age of aging.

And whether it's in Hollywood or in real life, things are constantly evolving.

- It's an exciting time.

As you had mentioned, there's a lot of change going on.

There's currently four different generations right now in the workspace.

- [Jason] The baby boomer generation was known for its roll up the sleeves work ethic, with many staying in the same job and career for years, if not decades.

- As boomers are obviously retiring and going into a different stage in their life, there's Zoomers kind of coming up.

- [Jason] As that transition unfolds, so too does the face of business ethics.

While some baby boomers might look at Gen Z as entitled, perhaps Gen Z isn't who some boomers think they are.

- And it's a large shift from what they had obviously kind of grown up with and then what they're seeing now.

So sometimes a change can be kind of worrisome and anxiety-inducing.

- I think our current students are a bit cynical with respect to their attitudes toward business, large businesses in particular.

- [Jason] Denis Arnold teaches ethics at the Belk College of Business at UNC Charlotte, primarily working with grad school students.

- And my research focus is corporate misconduct and corporate social responsibility.

We use cases of corporate misconduct as examples of what not to do.

- Just a lot of ethical dilemmas that tend to come up in, you know, business situations are just real life examples.

Like, we've had multiple case studies.

We talked about the events that happened at Wells Fargo.

- [Jason] The Wells Fargo Cross-selling scandal, which broke in 2016, was caused by the creation of millions of fraudulent savings and checking accounts created on behalf of clients without their knowledge or consent.

- And they targeted the elderly, they targeted people with English as a second language.

- Yeah, you think, how did it get this far?

How did no one stop it?

How did they like, make this the basis of their operation?

- And then people who blew the whistle were fired.

- [Jason] Then there's the modern day case of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX Cryptocurrency Exchange, who's now facing up to 50 years in prison.

- And he was just running a big Ponzi scheme using crypto.

So the mode of scam was totally not new, just what he used to perpetrate it was sort of new for our generation, you know, crypto.

- [Jason] It's cases like these that Arnold breaks down with his ethics classes, making students more aware of the business world they'll soon be entering.

- I think the misconduct that we've seen over the last 10 years, really since the financial crisis of 2016, 2017, has provided us with a multitude of case studies and illustrations of how not to govern a corporation.

- I don't wanna work at a place that's gonna be breathing down someone else's neck or breathing down my neck.

You know, I don't want to work at some place where I'm hurting the world or I'm hurting someone else necessarily.

I always wanna do good.

- I'm going on the healthcare side of business.

So that's definitely like a big thing that I'm looking forward to in like, evaluating the companies that I apply to.

- [Jason] The group SCORE, which stands for Service Core of Retired Executives, is a nonprofit founded in 1964 that provides free business mentoring services to perspective and established small business owners.

Even though most of the people volunteering these days are far from retired.

- We take any and all people who want to be mentored in any aspect of their business and we donate our time to do that for them.

- [Jason] What SCORE volunteers are noticing is the changing dynamic of what recent college grads are looking for as they enter the business world, namely ethical companies and more focus on work-life balance.

- Well, we have more evidence in the social sciences that shows what employees look for in an organization.

- They're really looking for different initiatives that the companies have to offer for wellness, for mental health, for diversity and inclusion, for training opportunities.

I personally think it's really exciting.

I know that sometimes they're getting a bad rap for wanting more and asking for more, but at the same time it's kind of holding companies and kind of holding corporations to a higher standard.

- [Jason] So could one argue that one generation is more ethical than another?

Probably.

- I really think the upcoming workforce of Gen Z, they are in some ways more ethical than people of my generation, millennials.

- So I don't think it's fair to kind of label one more ethical than the other.

- [Jason] As the next generation becomes more powerful, they'll likely see things differently in the business landscape, but whatever the generation, each could probably learn a thing or two from the others.

- I think our generation asks a lot of why.

A lot of people have the mindset of this always been like this, how it's gonna continue, but I think we're pretty good at breaking barriers and saying like, okay, it's going like this, but it hasn't always been positive.

How can we do something differently?

How can we make it better?

- They're kind of questioning each other.

So Gen Z is questioning the kind of boomers or older kind of generations.

They're not quite kind of experts just because they've been in the field for so long or longer than a Gen Z kind of newer graduate has been.

And at the same time, the boomers are also questioning the Gen Zers and saying, "Well, why do you do things like this?"

So if you can have a collaborative conversation, you can come to hopefully some type of understanding or middle ground or kind of understanding that they're actually looking for some of these similar things too.

- [Jason] Each generation has its own set of ethics and values, doesn't make anyone right or wrong, just different.

For "Carolina Impact," I'm Jason Terzis reporting.