The Effects of Character on the Perceived Stressfulness of Life Events and Subjective Well-Being of Undergraduate Business Students

Abstract

Stress and the associated correlates, such as depression, alcohol abuse, and suicidal ideation, are a global issue among college and university students. We assert that character is a personal resource that students have at their disposal to address personal, social, and environmental challenges they may encounter in their personal and academic lives. The results of a field study involving undergraduate business students show that character, operationalized as a higher order construct consisting of 11 interrelated dimensions, has a direct effect on the subjective well-being of students and an indirect effect through the perceived stressfulness of life events. Our results imply that it is essential for faculty and students at management education institutions to fully appreciate the importance of character for effective functioning and to develop the various character dimensions to address adverse personal, social, and environmental situations in a positive fashion.

Does Leader Character Have a Gender?

“…For example, the five most emphasized virtues—humanity, justice, prudence, courage, and temperance—accounted for close to 90% of the virtue-based communications identified in their analysis. These findings led Wilson and Newstead to conclude that: “Adopting virtue-based strategies cannot alone guarantee success, nor ward off future crises, but at the very least adopting such approaches helps us all to refine and develop our character such that we may cope more ethically and wisely with such challenges.” Our results therefore reinforce the idea that character is a critical or foundational personal resource that leaders can draw on to work through a particular personal or work-related challenge (e.g., Crossan et al, 2017 ; Seijts et al, 2022 ). Thus, to advance leadership theories, the ongoing research on character should (continue to) be integrated with existing leadership theories to make them more robust and informative as to how one becomes more effective as a leader and achieves sustained organizational performance.…”

“…They conceptualize character as an expression of virtues, personality traits, and values that manifest in observable behaviors that facilitate human excellence and produce social betterment (e.g., Bright et al, 2006 ; Crossan et al, 2017 ; Hannah & Avolio, 2011 ; Nguyen & Crossan, 2021 ; Peterson & Seligman, 2004 ; Sarros et al, 2006 ; Wang & Hackett, 2016 ; Wilson & Newstead, 2022 ). Research has also focused on the antecedents and consequences of character (e.g., Cameron et al, 2004 ; Seijts et al, 2022 ; Sosik et al, 2012 ), how to develop character in individuals (e.g., Byrne et al, 2018 ; Crossan et al, 2021a ; Hartman, 2006 ), and how to embed practices and processes in organizational policies to facilitate the development of character (e.g., Crossan et al, 2021b ; Sosik & Jung, 2018 ). Yet despite the significant progress in understanding character and its role in business leadership, many questions remain unanswered.…”

Reducing the Cost of Being the Boss: Authentic Leadership Suppresses the Effect of Role Stereotype Conflict on Antisocial Behaviors in Leaders and Entrepreneurs

“…Finally, we parceled any multi-dimensional measure in our study. Parceling refers to aggregating the respective items of a scale’s dimension to reduce the overall parameters to be estimated in an SEM (see Monzani et al, 2021a ; Seijts et al, 2021 for examples of parceling), and thus. Whereas this technique has received some critiques, Little et al (2009) argued that parceling is justified when the underlying factorial structure has been previously established in the literature and when the parceled indicators respect said factorial structure.…”

Explanation of subjective well-being from school burnout or sensation seeking: which is the biggest predictor for religious students

“…The issue of student welfare has become a hot topic of discussion because every country seeks to improve the quality of their respective education, including Indonesia, which according to data on educational capabilities represented by several basic abilities is reported to be still below the average expected of a group of countries around the world (OECD , 2019) so that pressure in education, specifically pressure in the realm of cognition, is considered to be able to improve the quality of education. But on the other hand this growth in quality is followed by physical fatigue in students which is rarely seen in education because this concept is not visible directly and this phenomenon is known as school burnout so that when improving quality in education it should also be in line with mental balance which is directly affect the quality of education itself (Seijts et al, 2021). This article confidently discusses the concept of well-being in terms of positive and negative emotions.…”