Abstract
The relationship between virtue ethics and leadership is profound and has been the subject of sustained examination (see, for example, Fontrodona et al., 2012). The core of these debates has centred on the way in which a life of the good, conceived as a process of self-awareness built through experience and reflection, has the capacity to comprise the people who inhabit, lead, and constitute organizations. Prima facie management education ought to entail the explicit development of the virtuous self, rather than this being a residual element to overall education. This requires a more reflective approach to management teaching practice. We are challenged in this endeavour by our status as providers of online education. Our central concern in this paper is to provide an account of a Leadership Development ePortfolio, particularly its development to a program of online leadership skill development. This includes, among other skills, the development of reflective practice skills, development of self-awareness, self-mastery (Senge, 1990), and a consideration of how to apply those skills to others (e.g.: mentoring) and with others (e.g., team learning, service learning). We argue that introducing these elements to a program fosters the development of ethically virtuous management graduates.
Highlights
In 2010 the United Nations (UN) put forward its ‘Principles of Responsible Management Education’ (PRME) stating that business school students need a greater grounding in the understanding and development of professional ethical practice
The UN argued that sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) have become ‘business critical’ because of the gravity of recent crises (UN, 2010; see Blasco, 2012; Waples et al, 2009)
Through the combination of admission criteria, curriculum, assessment methods and the requirement to complete an online Leadership Development ePortfolio (LDE) we argue that the online MBA which the authors teach into is making significant strides in facilitating the development of the virtuous self
Summary
In 2010 the United Nations (UN) put forward its ‘Principles of Responsible Management Education’ (PRME) stating that business school students need a greater grounding in the understanding and development of professional ethical practice. The second point of the broad framework is ‘deontological’ ethical theorizing, which is defined as being non-teleological (i.e.: not ends-based) and is exemplified contemporaneously in rights-based theories of justice and historically by the ‘categorical imperative’ developed by Immanuel Kant. Virtue ethics is a process of self-development through self-reflection: finding out what is virtuous, attaining this, and working on being virtuous defines the good life, at both individual and organizational levels. This tripartite framework is useful as a heuristic toward understanding ethical theory at a rudimentary level. If we accept the idea of the virtuous self as important, the teaching of these more nuanced understandings of virtue-and vice -has to be countenanced
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