The extent of anti-corruption education on future business leaders in Zimbabwe: A case of selected tertiary education institutions

Abstract

This study sought to investigate the extent of anti-corruption education in tertiary institutions for future leaders in a business environment in Zimbabwe, a case of selected institutions in Zimbabwe. The research objectives were to find out the extent of anti-corruption education on ethical culture, level of education on effective leadership and anti-corruption education on business legitimacy and to determine the mediating impact of anti-corruption strategies on the relationship between level of corruption and future business leaders’ organizational performance. After adopting the positivism paradigm, a stratified random sampling was used to select a sample size of 301. The study population was registered students from three tertiary institutions which were University of Zimbabwe, Harare Institute of Technology and Harare Polytechnic and data was collected from some randomly selected students through survey method by use of questionnaires. Both correlation and regression analysis were done, and the results revealed that, anti-corruption education on ethical culture and level of corruption have a significant strong positive relationship with future business leaders’ organizational performance. Corruption has presented leadership with an opportunity to use anti-corruption education as a strategic tool to increase future leaders’ ethical culture, level of education on effective leadership, business legitimacy, corporate governance, production output and tap into new business sustainable development strategies and improve quality and efficiency in the long run. Based on the study findings, the following recommendations: The tertiary anti-corruption education in business studies must be linked with the organization’s overall business strategy. Organizations must have robust performance measurement in place to evaluate and manage corruption effectively. Future research could be continued to assess the extent of anticorruption education in primary and secondary schools and measure various performance variables such as moral behaviour, values, and ethical cultures in multiple case schools, which affect with the success or failure of Anti-corruption education awareness campaigns.