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.