Six Realistic Workplace Classroom Interventions for Management Students

Description of the Issue

For more than 40 years, I have tried to tackle the overall question of how to introduce and acclimate my undergraduate management students to a variety of realistic workplace reward/punishment contingencies and management performance realities that they will face in the highly controlled organizational world they are about to enter after graduating. The classes that I teach in Principles of Management, Organization Behavior, Organization Theory, Teams/Collaboration, and Managerial Decision Making serve as the context for wanting answers to these questions. Some students may be shocked and disillusioned when they find out that their workplace expectations and desire for instant gratification are unrealistic and that the organization and management they will work for expects them to engage behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively based on its terms, not on their terms (Algers, Lindström, & Svensson, 2016; Luthy, Padgett, & Toner, 2009). I have pondered why our classroom dynamics have not reflected these workplace realities. Consequently, I decided to introduce teaching methods that modeled the realistic reward/punishment and managerial performance conditions that exist in organizations, hoping that my management students would be better prepared to become successful employees.

I use six classroom interventions to acquaint students with the realities of functioning in the highly controlled organizational world they are about to enter. These interventions are clearly communicated and structurally reinforced by an inclusive course syllabus and grading system that match closely with many of the workplace conditions my students will probably face and that I have faced in my 40 years of teaching in two higher academic institutions and also of having worked in two Fortune 500 companies.

The six interventions are (1) using points rather than grades for student evaluation; (2) using a reward and penalty grading system; (3) rewarding on-time attendance; (4) providing a competitive, points display of unidentified students; (5) using penalty procedures for social loafers in teams; and (6) using unannounced quizzes to enhance class preparedness. These interventions are described more thoroughly in the appendix and are theoretically grounded in the realistic job previews literature (Wanous, 1980) that is described in the next section.

There are reasons why these interventions cannot possibly cover all workplace realities. Interjecting workplace realism into classrooms is often captured in literatures relating to realistic workplace practices and work-based learning practices. Work-based learning interventions such as internships or on-the-job training are performed outside the college classroom and require a student to be literally inside an organizational setting before the student becomes fully aware of the multiple dimensions of the workplace (Algers et al., 2016; Elkjaer & Nickelson, 2016; Lester & Costley, 2010). Attempts to bring general workplace realism into the classroom can be accomplished via students analyzing a case study, listening to invited speakers, taking organizational tours, or participating in various experiential exercises cited in journals like Management Teaching Review, Journal of Workforce Training, or Journal of Instructional Pedagogies. The problem with these latter practices is that they are often sporadic, single, and noncontinuous classroom events. Consequently, students are not continuously exposed to the organizational information they receive about these practices, nor is the learning reinforced.

Alternatively, laboratory simulations and online testing opportunities acclimated toward the computer skills and digital future of our multigenerational workforce could offer a pedagogy of engagement that could be very effective in achieving some of the goals set out in some of my interventions, especially if the simulations implement formal cooperative learning groups (Smith, Sheppard, Johnson, & Johnson, 2005). These group-based simulations focus on joint performance: Members hold self and others accountable for quality work, promote one another’s success, do real work together and help and support one another’s efforts to learn, emphasize teamwork and collaborative skills, and evaluate the quality of work and how effective they are working together, and they are utilized in many different types of classrooms (Chapman, Miles, & Maurer, 2017; Magana, Seah, & Thomas, 2018; Riordan, Hine, & Smith, 2017).

The six realistic interventions have a theoretical basis of development in the previously mentioned realistic job preview literature but were also motivated by my professional and ethical considerations as a higher education teacher. As higher educational teachers, we ought to be interested in helping our students achieve the realistic and societal purposes of our higher academic institutions.

There have been three major institutional approaches trying to achieve these purposes. Initially, America focused on the democratic equality approach that had as its purpose to produce well-informed and engaged students who would be facilitators or contributors to the pursuit and creation of knowledge about the quality of democratic life and democratic processes (Biesta, 2007; Saichaie & Morphew, 2014; Singh, 2014). This approach was ultimately undermined by student fee increases, fiscal austerity, and accountability mechanisms (White, 2013) and was replaced by the social efficiency approach.

The social efficiency approach tries to provide efficient training for future employment and focuses on educating productive workers for the public good (Singh, 2014). Labaree (1997) describes this approach as vocationalism, in which students try to prepare themselves for a vocation by acquiring job skills because society needs productive workers, and higher academic institutions are factories that turn out these skilled workers.

The third institutional approach is the social mobility approach. It is representative of a career-oriented outcome focused on the pursuit of credentials and skills to obtain employee professionalism (Fein, 2014; Saichaie & Morphew, 2014). This professionalization process means that students would acquire high technical knowledge and would do so in a realistic socialization manner that transforms their self-images to make financial and social gains. This social mobility approach is representative of the managerialism, career-oriented outcome Fein (2014) says management teachers should feel responsible for producing in our management students.

All three approaches have limitations, and indeed, employer-based surveys (Hart Research Associates, 2015; National Association of College and Educators, 2016) have indicated that recent graduates seem deficient in both professionalism and socialization mannerisms. Thus, I feel a professional motivation to try to increase my students’ professionalism and socialization behaviors and attitudes through my teaching methods.

From a practical perspective, I am aware that my students will face many challenges once they try to secure permanent employment, and my interventions may not provide coverage of all job, organizational, managerial, and reward challenges they might face in their workplace. For example, my classroom interventions may not account for all the variations of intrinsic reward/punishment contingencies, various types of workplace designs, different performance management systems, or different organizational cultures that may reward attendance and punctuality differently than I do. Any classroom design will struggle to replicate an all-inclusive organization because of the differences noted above. Nevertheless, we need realistic and continuously reinforcing, not sporadic, classroom interventions that would acquaint our students with the types of attitudinal and behavioral changes they will have to adjust to if they want to have successful workplace careers.

Connections to Theory

Realistic job previews have been used to explain job relationships, performance expectations, work policies, and the context of the work environment in hopes of increasing the job satisfaction and reducing the turnover of job applicants by giving them both unfavorable and favorable information before an offer is made. Past research indicates that applicants then hold lower and more realistic expectations about the job they will be eventually doing and are better equipped to cope with the job environment and its frustrations (Earnest, Allen, & Landis, 2011; Hom, Griffeth, Palich, & Bracker, 1999; Wanous, 1980). I have taken the underlying premise of a realistic job preview and extended it to create the notion of a realistic job–organizational preview.

The realistic job preview research, coming mainly from the I/O psychology and general management field of studies, has focused mainly on helping reduce the uncertainty and ambiguity of new job seekers’ fit perceptions of their person-/job-related and person-/organization-related information (e.g., Shibly, 2019). Recent research suggests that realistic job–organizational previews have consequences for the onboarding process of new employees (Caldwell & Peters, 2018), the hiring of overqualified employees (Skowronski, 2019), responses to unmet job expectations and efficacy beliefs (Maden, Ozcelik, & Karacay, 2016), and dealing better with applicant attraction (Evertz & Süb, 2017). However, there has been little to no research to date on the effects of realistic reward/punishment conditions of these previews nor how teaching methods incorporating these realistic previews affect students in the classroom or after graduation.

It is subsequently suggested that students who are exposed and, more important, are required and continuously held accountable for dealing with realistic job–organizational previews of reward/punishment control and managerial performance requirements before entering employment will be more attractive to potential employers because they already have been made aware of what they will face as general required organizational workplace attitudes and behaviors.

The operationalization of my realistic teaching methods approach is contained within the dictates of my syllabus and grading system. Organizations have a system for communicating what the organization’s work activities and expectations are and a separate system for evaluating the employee’s work performance. As teachers, we use similar systems: the syllabus for indicating our requirements, rules and policies for managing the class, and also a grading policy that indicates how we will evaluate student performance. My interventions are proposed to simply use the syllabus and grading policy to match more closely the realistic organizational workplace conditions our students will face after graduating. Furthermore, they operate continuously throughout the semester rather than being sporadically utilized.

Suggestions for Future Research

A research framework might contain a number of propositions about realistic-based classrooms and students taking these classes. The first thing scholars must do would be to develop an instrument or index to measure the degree and number of realistic workplace interventions applied in any classroom. One important proposition would be that realistic-based classrooms produce statistically significant greater learning of that classroom’s academic subject matter than nonrealistic-based classrooms teaching the same academic subject. Another proposition would be that a realistic-based classroom produces statistically significant greater achievement of the social efficiency vocationalism and the social mobility professionalism purposes than a nonrealistic-based classroom.

Additional research propositions on just students rather than classrooms might posit that realistically aware students are more motivated, responsible, and accountable for learning their technical, hard skill subject matter; are more satisfied with their technical, hard skill subject matter; are more satisfied with their eventual employment selection; achieve greater employability; and sustain their original employment with their original employing organization longer compared with nonrealistically aware students.

Content analysis of student evaluations could reveal which interventions were most useful to students, especially if there was a distinction between working students and nonworking students taking the class. Students who have been employees for a few years could be sampled and asked if their employer–employee relationships had improved as a result of exposure to these workplace interventions.

Conclusions

These classroom interventions represent a straightforward method of achieving the objectives we have for our democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility purposes in our higher academic institutions. We try to manage and teach our students the technical, job-related skills they need to use in their careers, but we do little to teach them the organizational-based realistic reward/punishment and managerial performance-required attitudes and behaviors to be successful in their future workplace careers. Many of our students expect that the attitudes, behaviors, and reward consequences they experienced in their college preparation will apply equally as well in their workplace.

The major lesson I am trying to teach my students, and one for which our society needs to return to, is that our students, just like basically everyone else in our society, will always be held responsible and accountable for their individual attitudinal and behavioral performance and that the organizations they work for will try to exercise a lot of control over these attitudes and behaviors. This means that our students have to become more comfortable with and increase their capabilities to handle and adjust to ambiguity, change, uncertainty, and chaos in both their future organizational environments and the people they interact with (diversity), increase their recognition that failure is a common behavior in one’s life but also one of their best teachers (Vallett & Annetta, 2013), and recognize the need for continuous learning to upgrade their skills and abilities in order to become more creative and innovative.

There are some conclusions we might reach after reading about and further investigating the interventions in the appendix. Utilizing unannounced quizzes could foster greater student comfort with ambiguity, failure, and continuous learning efforts. Receiving points rather than grades could also foster greater comfort with ambiguity, and seeing the class point distribution is indicative of students’ individual performance in a highly competitive situation. Providing the class point distributions also provides a picture of winners and losers. However, it could also provide motivational and innovative incentives within our students to do better in hopes that the final outcome could be achieved differently.

Most organizations, irrespective of being a business, government, or nonprofit organization, operate under these proposed workplace reward and performance realities. The major professional lesson for our students is to finally realize that it is their responsibility to adapt to these workplace realities and that there will always be reward/punishment contingencies and managerial expectations of performance. It is my hope that this article will motivate teachers to give their students a more realistic job–organizational preview continuously in their classrooms so that the future world of work will be a seamless transition for the students of today.