Changes in Business Students' Value Orientations After the COVID-19 Outbreak: An Exploration

The values people hold tend to be relatively enduring. An important exception appears to be values adaptation in response to major, life-altering situations. Major events can act as triggers for people to adapt their values based on the new context. In particular, collective traumas—such as the COVID-19 pandemic—may incite immediate values change. The aim of the current paper is to compare business school students' value orientations before and after the COVID-19 global pandemic outbreak. We investigated responses from two comparable samples of business students: one surveyed before and one surveyed after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The subjects' individual value orientations were aggregated and analyzed by comparing the distribution of the first group's pre-COVID-19 outbreak responses with the second group's post-COVID-19 outbreak responses regarding the importance given to values in the Rokeach Values Survey. We further explored specific demographic differences in personal versus social orientations and competence versus moral orientations for our samples. Results confirm differences in business school students' pre-COVID-19 outbreak versus post-COVID-19 outbreak value orientations, with the post-COVID-19 outbreak sample reporting greater attention to social values, as predicted, and competence values, not as predicted. Implications of our findings are discussed.