Abstract
Well, it’s been another year of big disruptions in the higher education landscape and continued growth for JME. There have been several external trends, most notably the omnipresent discussions about the influence of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) in our classrooms and workplaces. This massive technological advancement has led to numerous important debates in the field (e.g., Krammer, 2023; Lindebaum & Fleming, 2024; Valcea et al., 2024), conversations about the impact on workplaces, as well as many research studies and innovations that are now flooding our manuscript queue. As the COVID-19 pandemic pushed educators to experiment with online teaching tools, likewise, GAI has fostered unanticipated growth for management educators seeking to understand, adapt, and responsibly advance this new technology for teaching and learning.
Fortunately, JME has a longstanding commitment to covering educational technology and the August 2024 Special Issue—From Taylor to Tableau: Technology as a Tool, Topic, and Differentiator in Management Education, led by Guest Editors Scott Allen and Steven Edelson—speaks to many of these disciplinary discussions evoked by GAI. In tandem, the February 2024 Special Issue—Teaching About Contemporary Careers, led by Guest Editors Suzanne De Janasz and Maury Peiperl—unpacks important conversations and changes needed in how we prepare students as future workers, managers, and leaders in the modern workplace given massive shifts in workplace practices, employment trends, and evolving social norms.
Special Issues (SIs) offer our readership a curated view on enduring topics in the management education landscape, as well as the chance to understand specific and emerging practices, curricular developments, and specialized topics. Looking ahead, we will publish one of these specialized topics of interest to both the MOBTS community and the broader management education community in early 2025—the much-anticipated JME 50th Anniversary, led by Guest Editors Stuart Middleton, Cindi Fukami, and Diana Bilimoria. We also look forward to the SI on Preparing Leaders to Tackle Grand Challenges (where the call for papers closed in fall 2024), and the SI on Management Education in Africa (where the call for papers will close in December 2024). Our team appreciates the numerous efforts of these Special Issue teams, who have worked to support prospective authors online and at many in-person events.
In addition to the surge of manuscripts on GAI pushing our numbers higher, we continue to see ongoing interest in the journal due to our 2023 impact factor. We are delighted to see growth in the past year to our current Impact Factor (IF) of 2.5. This is built on the legacy of the previous Co-Editors and Editorial Team members and has created opportunities for new authors whose institutional requirements require IF designation. We continue to plan for growth by renewing and expanding our Editorial Team and Board. We are very grateful to the members of the Team for all that they do for the journal!
What’s ahead for 2025? We anticipate that in the ongoing disruptions of known and unanticipated sorts, there will be a continued and increasing need for the management education community and professional development. So, we invite our readers to connect with the MOBTS community by attending one of our numerous conferences (MOBTS Oceania in Auckland, New Zealand in January, MOBTS in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA this June, and IMOBTS later in June in Mannheim, Germany). To connect with the journal, remember that we read abstracts by email, host online Office Hours, as well as bi-annual virtual manuscript development workshops. In person, you can find team members at all of the MOBTS conferences and many of the regional AOMs in the US, UK, and Oceania.
In This Issue. . .
Our last issue of 2024 includes two awards announcements, three research articles, one methods-focused essay, and an instructional innovation.
First, we are excited to congratulate the recipients of the 2023 Lasting Impact Award—Jeffrey D. Houghton, Jinpei Wu, Jeffrey L. Godwin, Christopher P. Neck, and Charles C. Manz—for their 2012 article titled “Effective stress management: A model of emotional intelligence, self-leadership, and student stress coping.” This award honors an article published in the journal at least 10 years prior that is deemed to have a lasting impact for readers. In their editorial for the current issue, “Now more than ever: Emotional intelligence, self-leadership, and student stress coping revisited,” the authors reflect on their article and the importance of the topic of student stress, in particular given the quantity and magnitude of stressors (such as the pandemic) that students have faced in recent years.
We are also thrilled to congratulate the winners of the 2023 Roethlisberger Award—Verónica Caridad Rabelo, Robert L. Bonner, and Oscar Jerome Stewart! As described on the Management & Organizational Behavior Teaching Society website, The Fritz Roethlisberger Memorial Award is co-sponsored by MOBTS and Sage Publications. The Roethlisberger Award commemorates Fritz Roethlisberger’s passionate devotion to inquiry and learning in the classroom. It is granted each year to the author or authors judged to have contributed the best paper on the teaching of organizational behavior and management published in the preceding year in the Journal of Management Education. (https://mobts.org/awards/)
We are grateful to Sarah Jean Woodside for chairing the 2023 committee and for the efforts of the large and well-coordinated award reviewer committee for their work determining this important award. In her editorial announcing the winner, “2023 Roethlisberger Award for Best Article presented to ‘An exercise for expanding privilege awareness among management students and faculty’,” she overviews the award and process, as well as highlights the impact and importance of Rabelo et al.’s (2023) article.
In “Missing the mark: Lessons from failing to foster learner engagement in a co-curricular program,” Steven Hitchcock, Sandra Seno-Alday, and Praveena Chandra reflexively discuss a co-curricular program designed by the authors that received very positive feedback, but where not all sessions had high attendance. This led the authors to undertake a number of focus groups with participants in the program to explore the research question: “What factors might explain the low participation in the Business School’s HAP [‘High Achievers Program’, which the authors note is a pseudonym] co-curricular activities?” From their findings, the authors draw several practical implications that will undoubtedly be of great interest to faculty and institutions designing such programs.
Instructors who focus on reflexivity in their courses will be excited to read Timothy O’Brien’s article, “Looking for development in leadership development: Assessing learning for reflexivity among graduate students.” In this study, Dr. O’Brien examines the following two research questions: “How do students representing different stages of development experience here-and-now methods designed to cultivate reflexivity?” and “What might different outcomes for students at different stages reveal about cultivating reflexivity for leadership practice?” via interviews with students in a master’s level leadership course at both the outset and end of the semester. This approach allowed the author to explore the experiences and development of the students, as well as highlight important pedagogical implications of this work.
With the shift toward prioritizing accessible data visualization, increasing access to big data, and the expected geometric growth of visuals with GAI, this is the article you need right now. In “Updating a Code for Teaching Ethical Visualizations,” William McHenry offers management educators who utilize data visualization of any kind—research courses, data analytics, capstone courses, and more— an updated code of ethics for visualizations based on Shepard’s (2001) code, revamped to consider machine learning and generative artificial intelligence dimensions. The updates offer a set of standards that define necessary quality features that prioritize honesty and transparency, confront biases, and encourage appropriate disclosures. With the valid concerns about decreasing critical thinking and ethical student competencies in the big data and GAI era, this is a welcomed response to what we can start doing in the classroom now that can prepare our students for this complex reality.
Prospective authors often ask us questions about methodology, especially related to quantitative approaches. In response, our editorial team has developed two articles to date that address common concerns and identify best practices in high-quality management education research. This second piece, “Recommendations for the Use of Experimental Designs in Management Education Research,” developed by Editorial Board member Don Bacon, builds upon the insights of Hamdani et al. (2023) and provides guidance for prospective authors on the myriad issues encountered in quantitative research papers. This essay focuses on experimental designs and offers specific guidance and recommendations for conducting valid and powerful research.
Finally, the instructional innovation, “I’m glad I met you: ageism interventions in an entrepreneurship course,” will interest entrepreneurship educators and those with equity, diversity, and inclusion learning outcomes. Based on their research, the authors identified that business curricula largely limit lessons about ageism to hiring and promotion decisions or market segments. In response to the lack of dynamic ageism content, Nancy Forster-Holt and Phillip Clark developed this experiential workshop, by adapting the Disrupt Aging curriculum developed by the American Association of Retired Persons (A.A.R.P.) to foster university students’ examination of their personal attitudes about age and aging. The ageism intervention occurs in an entrepreneurship context, and students work in groups with entrepreneurs from the Baby Boom generation (birth years 1946–1964). Check out their process if you seek an ageism intervention for your course that affects attitudes about older entrepreneurs.
