Exploring the use of virtues to facilitate identity construction among management students

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities facing educators who wish to facilitate management students’ identity construction as a means to foster their students’ emergent professional identities and post-graduate career attainments. We look to medical and law schools’ recent advancements, alongside their traditional dissemination of knowledge and technical skills, in better aligning students’ developing identities and related behaviors with respective professional ideals. Drawing on insights from these professional schools, we examine whether the concept of “professional virtues” that’s proven valuable in these contexts might also be used to facilitate students’ professional identity construction within management education.