Including Corporate Social Responsibility, Environmental Sustainability, and Ethics in Calibrating MBA Job Preferences

Our research studies 759 MBAs graduating from eleven business schools to gain insight into what MBAs in the 21st Century care about during their job searches. We update the MBA job preference literature by using adaptive conjoint analysis to calibrate the relative importance of a wide variety of job factors combining factors found in previous research in disparate fields (general management, applied psychology, corporate social performance, ethics, and marketing). Our results show the relative importance of organizational reputation related to caring for employees, ethical products and practices, and social and environmental responsibility, compared to factors like financial package, job challenge, etc. to 759 MBAs graduating from eleven business schools eight in North America and three in Europe. Study limitations and some mitigations of these are discussed.