Making Humanistic Business Schools Happen: Exploring the Faculty's View on Growing Learning Style Versatility of Program Participants

Business school graduates and their employers face the challenge of operating in ever more difficult markets. As business schools have been criticized for lacking relevance, one way to add more value is to hone the learning skills of program participants. The logic is that the better and faster they learn, the more effectively they will cope with the demanding programs as well as business challenges later on. Adopting a humanistic management lens, demands are even higher. Humanistic management fosters abilities to protect and enhance human dignity while building organizations with solid economic engines and valued offerings to the market. In turn, Humanistic Business Schools (HUBS) bring these two expectations together. They provide more value to their program participants by improving learning skills and teaching how to build solutions, taking better care of human dignity. This article presents new research on how faculty can contribute when honing the learning style versatility of program participants. Adopting a constructivist grounded theory based on in-depth interviews, the study suggests four levels of learning style maturity. Gained insights can help improve business schools as institutions and the impact graduates can have on their employers.