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Justice, Deontology and Moral Meaningfulness as Factors to Improve Student Performance and Academic Achievement

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Abstract

The relationship between ethics and performance has previously been addressed in the literature, although there are still some gaps, for example, the relationship of ethical ideologies to student performance. This work aims to contribute to the literature with a statistical evaluation using partial least squares path modelling (PLS-PM) regarding whether university students’ ethical ideologies and moral meaningfulness influence their level of student performance and academic achievement. Results indicate that the ideologies of justice and deontology increase moral meaningfulness, moral meaningfulness in turn increase student’s citizenship behaviours and student’s in-role performance, and finally, student’s in-role performance positively influences academic achievement. This research provides resources applicable to the fields of pedagogy and ethics to encourage performance during the study and highlight the value of the ideologies of justice and deontology.

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Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available in Harvard Dataverse with the identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AM4CUP

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Funding

No funding was received for conducting this study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas Y Empresariales, Universidad Panamericana, Álvaro del Portillo 49, Zapopan, Jalisco, 45010, México

    Manuel Soto-Pérez & Juan E. Núñez-Ríos

  2. Departamento de Humanidades, Universidad Panamericana, Álvaro del Portillo 49, Zapopan, Jalisco, 45010, México

    Jose-Enrique Ávila-Palet

Authors
  1. Manuel Soto-Pérez
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  2. Jose-Enrique Ávila-Palet
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  3. Juan E. Núñez-Ríos
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Manuel Soto-Pérez, Jose-Enrique Ávila-Palet and Juan E. Núñez-Ríos. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Manuel Soto-Pérez and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Manuel Soto-Pérez.

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The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Conclusions

This study fulfils its objective by providing statistical evidence that justice and deontology positively influence moral meaningfulness, promoting CB and in-role performance. As for relativistic and utilitarian ideologies, no evidence was obtained that they significantly influence moral meaningfulness. Regarding ideology of egoism negatively influenced moral meaningfulness, which had inverse effects on CB and in-role performance. In other words, the higher a student’s level of egoism, the lower his or her level of moral meaningfulness, citizenship behaviours and in-role performance.

Furthermore, this study proposed a multidimensional analysis of academic performance by separating it into CB, in-role performance, and academic achievement. According to the statistical evidence of the present study, justice and deontology increase moral meaningfulness. Moral meaningfulness enhances CB and in-role performance. Moreover, CB influences also in-role performance. Finally, in-role performance enhances academic achievement. Consequently, justice may be a factor that fosters citizenship behaviours, while deontology may be a factor that fosters in-role performance. The relationships analysed empirically in this study were not found in any previous study.

The results contribute to the literature by extending research relating to ethics and performance by analysing the influence of ethical ideologies on academic performance, which had been poorly understood. These contributions enable teachers to establish strategies to develop ideologies of justice and deontology in their students while discouraging egoism, thus enhancing moral meaningfulness, citizenship behaviours and in-role performance. Moreover, the results of this study also highlight that the ideologies of egoism, utilitarianism and relativism exalted by contemporary society had a negative or null influence on moral meaningfulness and academic performance, which could motivate a reflection in order to appreciate more justice and duty to be.

The findings of this study will directly benefit educators, educational institutions, parents, and students by clarifying which ideologies to foster and which to diminish in order to promote students' academic performance. The results will also provide greater insight into how to develop students with low levels of CB, in-role performance, or academic achievement. Finally, schools can establish strategies to encourage justice and ethics within their curriculum and specifically through ethics courses or case studies.

In the future, this analysis of ethical ideologies should be extended where cultural aspects of different regions and countries can be contrasted for the academic field. On the other hand, it is also important to note that there remain gaps in the literature in identifying how ethical ideologies influence performance, specifically what other variables mediate this relationship in addition to moral meaningfulness. Another aspect that can be improved in this research is increasing the number of scenarios that students judge using the MES to understand better the relationship between ethics and academic performance.

A limitation of this study is that the sampling method used was non-probability and convenience, and for that reason extrapolating the results for the entire population beyond the sample will be questionable. Another limitation of this study is that only one scenario was used to apply the MES, thus restricting the understanding of the problem to a limited perspective. However, the results show the relevance of making a more significant investment in resources to obtain a sample and data that avoids these characteristics.

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Soto-Pérez, M., Ávila-Palet, JE. & Núñez-Ríos, J.E. Justice, Deontology and Moral Meaningfulness as Factors to Improve Student Performance and Academic Achievement. J Acad Ethics 20, 375–397 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-021-09423-3

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