Abstract:

There have been recent calls for positioning human flourishing and well-being as foundations for business school curriculum. Despite these calls, specifically how to evolve educational practices toward a greater focus on flourishing and well-being as opposed to a focus on job training and other marketization emphases remains a conundrum for business educators. The current research empirically relates academic achievement, social involvement, and subjective well-being to the flourishing of a millennial cohort of university business students. Our results demonstrate that self-perceived flourishing goal achievement appears to fully mediate the direct effect from social involvement to social well-being. This implies that simply involving students in a greater number of social activities alone will likely not contribute to their well-being. Rather, our results show it is the congruence of social activities and behaviors with their flourishing-related goals as the most efficacious path to increasing student well-being in higher education. We are able to show that an emphasis on flourishing in higher education instead of the current and traditional method of focusing on value delivery and sales (i.e., marketization) appear reasonably achievable with the Millennial cohort. Results indicate that self-perceived flourishing goal achievement appears to fully mediate the direct relationship from social involvement to social well-being.

Keywords: