Abstract
The growing interest in sustainable development in all sectors of the economy has fostered a noteworthy shift toward responsible management education (RME). This emerging view underscores that business schools provide students with more than just managerial knowledge as they also develop students toward responsible management. Based on socialization theory, we show how this development occurs by studying RME as a process that relates to students’ values, attitudes and behavioral intentions. With data from a large international survey of business students from 21 countries, our findings show that RME facilitates students’ self-transcendence, the development of conservation values and positive attitudes toward corporate social responsibility (CSR). Further, RME is positively related to students’ CSR behavioral intentions (willingness to sacrifice salary to work for a responsible employer) through the mediating role of values and attitudes. In sum, this study extends socialization theory to the higher education domain to show that business schools can affect students’ prosocial, ethical values and intentions, with implications for responsible management and RME.
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Abbreviations
- CSR:
-
Corporate social responsibility
- MBA:
-
Master of Business Administration
- PRME:
-
Principles for Responsible Management Education
- RME:
-
Responsible management education
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the PRME Secretariat at the United Nations Global Compact office for their support on this project, the signatory business schools who participated in the study, and their students who responded to the survey. We would also like to thank Prof Anthony Buono for his review of an earlier version of this article and Prof Carole Parkes for connecting us to PRME Champion schools. We would like to express our gratitude to Prof Jill Brown for her guidance and the three anonymous JBE reviewers for their enormous help and useful comments on the manuscript.
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Haski-Leventhal, D., Pournader, M. & Leigh, J.S.A. Responsible Management Education as Socialization: Business Students’ Values, Attitudes and Intentions. J Bus Ethics 176, 17–35 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04593-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04593-3