A new study from the University of Surrey suggests that a slight change in business education may help reshape how future managers lead. By teaching MBA students to listen more effectively, educators could strengthen humility and ethical judgment, producing leaders who create value without relying on ego or dominance. The findings, published in the Journal of Business Ethics, directly challenge the assumption that leaders are born with fixed traits. While business schools have often been accused of fuelling overconfidence and self-promotion, this research finds that character can be deliberately nurtured through specific interpersonal training.
The study followed 260 MBA students over four years in a quasi-experiment that compared two forms of learning. One group attended a course focused entirely on listening as an active skill. Their exercises included paired storytelling, structured feedback interviews, and reflection sessions designed to uncover biases and prompt students to acknowledge others’ perspectives. The control group, meanwhile, took more traditional lecture-based modules typical of many management programmes. Although both groups improved academically, students in the listening course showed far greater improvement in listening skills and consistently scored higher on multiple measures of humility.
Dr Irina Cojuharenco, Associate Professor in Management at Surrey Business School and co-author of the research, highlights that these results disrupt a long-standing belief about leadership development. Humility has often been viewed as an inherited trait—either present in a leader’s personality or absent altogether. Yet the experiment demonstrated that humility can be cultivated through intentional learning. According to Dr Cojuharenco, when future leaders learn to listen deeply, they begin to recognise their own limitations, value the contributions of others, and make more ethically grounded decisions. Listening serves as a behavioural pathway through which humility becomes visible and meaningful in professional practice.
The research also uncovered a striking distinction during the pandemic, when the listening-focused course moved online. Students still improved their listening skills through virtual sessions, yet their humility did not increase. This contrast suggests that humility may depend on the nuanced interactions that happen when people share physical space. Tone, presence, trust, and vulnerability appear to develop more easily in face-to-face settings, where non-verbal cues and shared attention help build genuine interpersonal connections.
These results raise questions for both business schools and organisations shifting toward remote work. Digital communication is efficient at distributing information, but it may not foster the depth of engagement needed to cultivate moral and empathetic leadership. If ethical behaviour relies partly on how leaders understand and respond to others, then relying heavily on online environments could make it more challenging to encourage humility in professional cultures.
Dr Cojuharenco argues that business education must therefore be more deliberate in designing opportunities for real-time interpersonal listening. Rather than treating communication as a secondary soft skill, structured listening training could be integrated into MBA curricula as a foundation for ethical leadership. The study implies that leadership rooted in humility is not only desirable but teachable, provided that students learn through human connection rather than passive instruction. By embedding these practices in business education, institutions can help develop leaders whose success rests not on self-promotion but on integrity, collaboration, and care for the impact of their decisions.
More information: Michal Lehmann et al, Cultivating Humility in Business Education: A Listening-Focused Pedagogy for Future Leaders, Journal of Business Ethics. DOI: 10.1007/s10551-025-06099-2
Journal information: Journal of Business Ethics Provided by University of Surrey