Promoting virtue ethics in business, management and entrepreneurship education: A faculty perspectives study on the integration of learnings from religion and spiritual traditions

Cultivating intellectual virtues is often assumed to take place within the university context (Brant et al., 2022). Open-mindedness, creativity, and curiosity are widely recognized as relevant for business, management and entrepreneurship (BME) students. Yet, the deliberate promotion of virtue ethics does not occur in the same way, although it once was an explicit educational aim of many universities, especially in Europe and the United States (Brant et al., 2022). While the value of ethical formation in BME studies is increasingly recognized, an explicit focus on the cultivation of virtue ethics remains rare in contemporary academic programs (Lamb et al., 2021).
The language of virtue ethics places moral character at the center of ethics (Fontrodona et al., 2013; Moore, 2008). Unlike rule-based or consequentialist approaches, it emphasizes the question of what kind of person one should strive to become, focusing on character formation and inner dispositions rather than external rules or the calculation of outcomes (Jones, et al., 2005; Yuan et al. 2023). This perspective invites individuals to pursue the good across all dimensions of life and underscores that virtues are shaped and transmitted within cultural and traditional contexts (Yuan et al., 2023). Its cultivation has long been rooted in both philosophical and religious/spiritual traditions (Melé & Frontodona, 2017; Nistelrooij et al., 2022). In the university context, however, ethics teaching has relied primarily on philosophical frameworks (Ferrero & Sison, 2012; Ma et al., 2012). Standard pedagogical materials for BME instructors often rest on the assumption that philosophical approaches alone can provide a holistic and neutral basis for ethics (Moosmayer et al., 2019), while alternative sources grounded in religious and spiritual insight, despite their recent recognition as contributing to a more humanistic BME education (Melé & Frontodona, 2017; Kumar et al., 2022; Van Buren III et al., 2020), continue to be viewed with suspicion by some, who cite their association with religious institutions and the concern that such sources may only be meaningful to members of specific faith communities (Moya & Toledano, 2025).
While there is a growing theoretical debate on these issues, little is known about how faculty in BME education perceive virtue ethics in their teaching, with the lived experiences of instructors often overlooked. This study seeks to address this gap by exploring faculty perspectives on the role of virtue ethics in BME education, with particular attention to the potential contribution of religious and spiritual traditions as sources for learning virtue ethics.