Virtue as Competence: A Conceptual Integration of Competence Thinking with MacIntyrean Virtue Ethics

Abstract

Recent management education debates identify room for greater emphasis on character building within business school pedagogies. As a way forward, we suggest virtue ethics as an agent-centred character-building ethical approach that provides guidance in management education where norm- and outcome-oriented ethical approaches have limits. However, its whole-person and life-span perspective makes it difficult to develop virtue ethics competence in business schools. We thus conceptualise a virtue as competence learning framework for management. We do so by integrating Alasdair MacIntyre's virtue approach with the intellectual–behavioural–personal (IBP) competence framework that specifies independent and interdependent dimensions of intellectual, behavioural and personal competence. The virtue as competence learning framework guides learners to develop virtue competence. We make three contributions. First, we explicitly address the whole-person and life-span perspective of virtue and thus address the lack of systematic approaches to virtue ethics learning in managerial studies. Second, by conceptually applying the IBP competence framework to the learning of a whole-person ethics approach, we address the particularisation of competences in the competence debate. Third, we offer concrete inspirations for a character-building pedagogy that develops whole-person competence and addresses the scarcity of ethics pedagogies that develop behavioural and personal competence.