Management Education and Interpersonal Growth: A Humanist Transcendental-Personalist Perspective

Abstract

This chapter critically addresses the direction towards which Management Education (ME) should evolve in the future. Drawing from transcendental personalist anthropology, it explores what constitutes us as human beings, and argues that future ME should address students' moral selfhood and their disposition toward interpersonal growth to construct a better future with others. After a 2 critical exploration of current humanist proposals in ME and their philosophical bases, we argue for a renewal of anthropological foundations of humanistic ME in light of three personalist principles: 1) the person's intimacy and dignity, 2) the transcendence of human beings, who grow as persons through free and caring interpersonal relations, and 3) a view of human action as the manifestation of the person's intimacy and transcendence, and as her arena for interpersonal, virtuous development. The last section explains how these three personal dimensions could be addressed in future ME, namely by fostering future managers' moral selfhood through selfreflection, by proposing an interpersonal pedagogy of the gift, and by promoting personalist practical wisdom. These practices constitute possible paths toward renewed ethical management education that goes beyond traditional 'know-what' and 'know-how' content to include ethically informed 'know-why' and 'know-for-whom' knowledge. Ultimately, they facilitate future managers' disposition for interpersonal growth.

Integrating ‘common good’ authenticity for sustainable human resource management reporting

“…Concerning reconsideration of the roles of HRM in practice, we suggest that more emphasis be placed on the mandate of HR going beyond good management of human ‘resources’, toward balancing moral and economic aspects of the common good (see Albareda and Sison, 2020; Bridoux and Stoelhorst, 2022). This could even mean that HR professionals themselves need to cultivate the kind of moral maturity, virtues, and integrity, that enable them to play a role as a catalyst for sustainable organisational performance amidst complex demands (Akrivou and Bradbury-Huang, 2011), and to do so with a humanistic management orientation, and from within a personalist virtue ethic of service (see Akrivou et al, 2022). Such professional purposes and dispositions require not just strategic transformation of the agenda of HRM, but also virtuous new leaders who rely on wider education.…”

The role of empathy in shared intentionality: Contributions from Inter-Processual Self theory

“…Fourthly, in IPS, action with relational intimacy aspires to a humanist transcendental-personalist perspective as understood in the philosophy of Polo (see Akrivou et al, 2022), whereby integrity seeks to enable both improving a focal IR while also striving for a sustainable wider co-existence. To this end, action requires finding an appropriate kind of personal practical wisdom which is more than just prudence, as it integrates the cognitive, affective, ethical, and practical bases and forms of knowing (Akrivou and Scalzo, 2020;Akrivou et al, 2020a,b).…”

Religion and Interfaith Dialogue: The Forgotten Pedagogical DEI Initiative in Business Education and Strategic Planning

“…Not only are faculty more productive and effective when coursework is contributing to the schools' mission and strategic plan (Dyllick & Muff, 2020), but Tan (et al, 2018) makes the case that accounting faculty, specifically, tend to be "disconnected" from important accreditation review visits if learning objectives are solely assessed in capstone management courses. Given their area of expertise, accounting and finance faculty, and other faculty within technical disciplines should participate in order to examine how technical subjects that pertain to management education are taught, potentially slightly downplaying student technical skill acquisition in favor of integrating assessments displaying how students can adapt to new business situations (Akrivou, et al, 2022).…”