Responsible management education: The leadership role of PRME business schools

Abstract

The literature largely agrees about the relevance of higher education institutions in assembling their internal systems to contribute to sustainability challenges. Business schools are also expected to commit to the Sustainable Development Goals and become aligned with the Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME). Moreover, it is suggested that if a business school is a PRME signatory, the students will likely be educated as responsible leaders. The literature on responsible management education successfully invested in literature reviews, framework development and analyses of the university reports available; however, it lacks solid studies conducted worldwide that aim to understand the extent to which professors are implementing sustainability-related concepts and the PRME principles into teaching as well as assessing if they have support from the top-management administration of their courses. Based on this gap, a world survey was conducted, receiving 969 valid answers from teaching staff in PRME signatory and non-signatory business schools from 104 different countries. Hypothesis testing, descriptive statistics, and frequency analysis were deployed to understand the differences between PRME signatory and non-signatory institutions. The results indicate that PRME signatory business schools' professors significantly tend to include sustainability-related topics in their teaching and receive more support from their institution and superiors.