Facilitating moral maturity: integrating developmental and cultural approaches

ABSTRACT

This study integrates developmental and cultural approaches to student development and finds that millennial college students are responsive to moral formation. A particular challenge to prosociality among contemporary generations is growing up within a cultural context that aggrandizes a self-focus during emerging adulthood. Businesses are increasingly integrating spirituality at work, in part because of the benefits religiosity has in developing prosocial behaviors. However, businesses and universities can have concerns about explicitly engaging religiosity. We thus study a pedagogical approach that engages religiosity to investigate whether this promotes prosocial moral values. Employing a mixed-methods design, we analyze quantitative and qualitative changes in students completing a management education course with this pedagogical approach and compare their changes over time to a control group completing conventional ethics courses during the same time period. Findings indicate that prosocial development is possible during college and that explicit attention to diverse religious views aids moral development.

KEYWORDS:

• Religiosity
• values
• ethics
• morality
• management education
• diversityof faith traditions

Acknowledgment

The authors wish to acknowledge the contributions of graduate and undergraduate research assistants — DeAndre’ T. Beadle, Tiffany E. Hood, and Sanjana Venugopal — as well as the thoughtful contributions by the anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For our purposes, Millennials refers to the first generation of young people who transitioned into adulthood with the elongated life course development process through emerging adulthood prior to young adulthood. We thus view the more important characteristic being the age and life stage of young people, rather than the generational label that is most often used in public discourse. We here are focused on college students who are in their 20s.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patricia Snell Herzog

Patricia Snell Herzog, PhD, is the Melvin Simon Chair and Associate Professor of Philanthropic Studies in the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at IUPUI. Herzog’s interests include social scientific investigations of charitable giving, youth and emerging adults, and religiosity. Herzog’s book publications include Souls in Transition: The Religious Lives of Emerging Adults in America (Smith and Snell 2009), which investigates a nationally representative, longitudinal, mixed-methods study for the cultural structures of emerging adulthood, including moral meaning-making processes associated with establishing adulthood identities. Herzog has also published on youth and emerging adults in the Journal of Adolescent Research, Youth & Society, and Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

Daniel E. Harris

Daniel E. Harris is Director of the Tyson Center for Faith and Spirituality in the Workplace in the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas. Harris has 12 years of experience in business and 29 years of experience as a diplomat in the U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service, the federal government’s front-line trade agency. A retired Senior Foreign Service officer with the rank of Minister Counselor, Harris has served in Europe, Africa, and Latin America, as well as in senior management positions in FCS Headquarters. Harris’ career highlights include a four-year tour as U.S. Consul General in Düsseldorf, Germany (1999–2003), and three years as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Operations in the Commercial Service (2005 until 2008).

Jared Peifer

Jared Peifer, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Management in CUNY’s Baruch College Zicklin School of Business. Peifer received his doctoral degree at Cornell University and served a postdoctoral position at Rice University. Peifer’s research focuses on stakeholder responses to a firm’s social responsibility or irresponsibility. Most of his existing work in this area focuses on socially responsible investing. More broadly, his research focuses on the moral motivations of people as they engage in various economic activities, including charitable giving, environmental consumption, voluntary simplicity and the commercialization of scientific research. His work is published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Business Ethics, Social Forces and Socio-Economic Review, among other journals.