Abstract
December is a time to review the achievements of the year and to look forward to the New Year. During this past year, the Management Teaching Review’s host Society changed its name to Management & Organizational Behavior Teaching Society (MOBTS). The new name not only reflects the Society’s mission of enhancing the quality of teaching and learning across the management disciplines but also maintains the Society’s heritage in the field of organizational behavior.
The exercises, resource reviews, and insights from research in this issue of Management Teaching Review echo this year-end integration of old and new. They present ideas for building skills in two staples of the management and organizational behavior disciplines—leadership and teamwork—as well as in two newcomers to the curriculum—followership and resilience.
For instructors seeking new ideas for building leadership skills, this issue offers three Experiential Exercises that explore different dimensions of leadership as well as some ideas about course design in the form of Research-to-Practice Insights.
One dimension of leadership is values. Kristi Lewis Tyran begins her undergraduate leadership course with an activity called “Preparing to Lead: A Leadership Philosophy Exercise for Business Students” that uses self-assessment and reflection to help students articulate and communicate their own values.
Vision is another dimension of leadership. Maria Alejandra Quijada describes a series of easily accessible video clips and offers corresponding discussion questions in “Ideas for Teaching Vision and Visioning.” This series of exercises can be used equally well in face-to-face or online courses.
By definition, leaders do not exist without followers. In the third exercise, Marc Hurwitz argues that followership is an equally important concept to leadership, but teaching it is hampered by a cultural bias for leadership. His activity, “Followership: A Classroom Exercise to Introduce the Concept,” aims to foster change in this attitude by exposing students to both the concept and the bias.
In their Research-to-Practice Insights contribution, authors Kelly Davis McCauley, Emily Hammer, and Amanda S. Hinojosa point out that at different stages of adulthood, students understand and apply leadership instruction differently. Therefore, to customize a leadership course to the needs of individual learners, they advocate using “An Andragogical Approach to Teaching Leadership.”
Many students learn about leadership in the context of team activities. This issue includes an original Experiential Exercise for introducing face-to-face teamwork and a Resource Review that supports virtual team activities.
Kerri Anne Crowne describes an exercise called, “It’s Salsa Time! A Team Activity,” which allows students to become acquainted with one another, experience the team development process, and learn team-related concepts, all in the context of preparing, sharing, and eating salsa.
For instructors who use virtual teams, the work of Barbara Larson, Opal Leung, and Kenneth Mullane will be useful. They compare and evaluate 11 computer-mediated communication tools commonly used to run virtual team projects in “Tools for Teaching Virtual Teams: A Comparative Resource Review.”
The remaining articles address the concept of resiliency, the adaptability necessary to be able to return to one’s previous level of engagement, enthusiasm, or activity after setbacks or failure. The authors point out that although adaptability and resiliency are important factors in the success of leaders and teams, they are not commonly seen among Millennials. They recommend explicitly addressing this need with activities designed to build resiliency awareness and skills.
First, Patricia Berg and Carol Pietrasz provide two activities to introduce the concept of resiliency, increase students’ resiliency self-awareness, and encourage perseverance. This Experiential Exercise is titled “Turning Classroom Failure Into Student Success: The Value of Integrating Resiliency Building Activities in the Academic Classroom.”
Finally, Kevin S. Thompson and David Noble tie resiliency to team activities in their Research-to-Practice Insights article titled, “Enhancing Adaptivity and Resilience Through Team Member Change.” Based on a classroom experiment, they propose that systematically switching team members during multiround team simulations can enhance students’ resiliency skills.
In conclusion, if your teaching plan for the new year calls for building management and organizational behavior staples, such as leadership or teamwork, or curricular newcomers, such as followership or resiliency—or any combination thereof, we are sure you will find some immediately useful resources among the articles in this issue.