Integrating Nature into Management Education to Develop Interbeing for Responsible Leadership
Journal
Academy of Management Proceedings
Type
conference paper
Date Issued
2025-01-17
Author(s)
Abstract
In this paper, I illustrate the potential of time in nature to develop the meta-competence of interbeing (Potts, Le Hunte and Ross, 2023), contributing to transformative learning towards responsible leadership in business students. Drawing from a bachelor sus-tainability certificate program at an elite business school, I show how faculty can introduce the instructional innovation of Nature Immersion into the curriculum in a way that comple-ments other teaching, thereby deepening and personalizing new sustainability knowledge students acquire. A key contribution of this paper is to highlight how immersion in nature can lead to increased temporal awareness in business students, and how this heightened sense of connection across (pre)history can contribute to intrinsic feelings of social and eco-logical responsibility that can support responsible leadership. Following a brief review of literature on management education, transformative learning and interbeing, I describe the Nature Immersion and provide details of its effectiveness derived from critical incidents identified by students in post-program reflections.