Cultivating Virtue at Work: Lessons from Marcel Meyer

What can Aristotle teach us about meaningful work today?

In this episode, Andrew Soren sits down with Marcel Meyer, professor at the School of Economics and Business at the University of Navarra, to explore how virtue ethics can help us navigate modern leadership and organizational life.

Drawing from Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia (human flourishing), Marcel shares how cultivating character, wisdom, and purpose allows leaders to create workplaces where people thrive individually and collectively.

Key Takeaways

• Virtue is developed through action and reflection. Ethical character isn’t innate, but built through everyday choices, habits, and feedback that shape who we become at work and in life.
• Flourishing happens in community. Meaningful work and ethical growth depend on relationships and shared responsibility, not isolation.
• Leadership is a form of rhetoric. Effective leaders inspire through pathos (empathy), logos (reason), and ethos (character), which aligns emotion, logic, and integrity to create trust and shared purpose.
• Hope and optimism can be cultivated. Drawing from Positive Organizational Scholarship, Marcel outlines how leaders can foster environments that generate positive cycles of emotion, action, and growth.

Why This Episode Matters

Aristotle may not have written about modern workplaces, but his philosophy offers a timeless framework for understanding what makes work meaningful. Marcel’s perspective bridges ancient wisdom with organizational science, offering leaders practical ways to ground their teams in purpose, integrity, and human connection. This episode is for anyone curious about how moral character and practical wisdom can shape organizations that truly enable people to flourish.

About Our Guest

Marcel Meyer is a professor at the School of Economics and Business at the University of Navarra, specializing in ethical leadership, organizational behavior, and Aristotelian virtue ethics. His research examines how leadership grounded in virtue and purpose fosters human flourishing within organizations. Marcel’s work integrates philosophy with management practice, spanning topics from executive communication on sustainability to the cultivation of practical wisdom in leaders. A former corporate trainer for companies like Volkswagen and Liebherr, he brings both academic and applied expertise to his study of virtue in business.