“I Get It Now!”: An Exercise to Highlight Unearned Privilege Using Resource Allocation and Rewards

Individuals who are privileged are often unaware of the unearned advantages that they have. Because of this lack of awareness, individuals with privilege may attribute poor performance of a non-privileged individual to that individual’s lack of effort or ability, rather than recognizing that the non-privileged person may not have had sufficient opportunities or resources. Without fully being aware of such privilege, it can be difficult for students to appreciate the diversity surrounding them, both in the classroom and in the workplace. This experiential exercise and suggested debrief strategies illustrate the concept and consequences of privilege.

Developing Workforce Planning Skills in Human Resource Management Courses: A Data-Driven Exercise

Workforce planning is prevalent and recognized as a good strategic practice in many organizations. However, business students may have little experience with workforce planning or workforce analytics. The purpose of this article is to present a workforce planning exercise for use in a face-to-face or online classroom setting. In this exercise, students practice applying workforce planning concepts to calculate internal employment data, find and collect external employment data, and combine multiple, sometimes conflicting, data to make workforce predictions and recommendations for a hypothetical organization. This exercise is designed to help students develop career-relevant skills and is intended for use in human resource management, talent acquisition, talent management, staffing, and/or selection classes.

Sorting It Out: Identifying and Addressing Conflicts and Business Ethics in Global Value Networks

Global value networks are often large, complex, and opaque. Understanding the relationships among stakeholders involved in these networks or organizations can be challenging. This card sort task provides an interactive way to engage participants in questioning the roles of stakeholders who are involved in a business ethics dilemma or an organizational product failure. This card sort task and discussion activity encourages participants to recognize that stakeholders may hold different knowledge, responsibility, or power; identify competing, conflicting, or complementary interests across stakeholders; articulate logical arguments; and engage in debate, compromise, and critical evaluation. This technique has been used successfully with undergraduate and postgraduate business, management, and social science students and is suitable for in-person and remote classes.

Can You Escape? Using Mobile App Escape Games to Create a Holistic Experiential Learning Process Online

Mobile app escape games are excellent tools to create an experiential learning process in online contexts. Through the act of solving puzzles to escape the rooms, students experience a process in which they need to discover new information and clues, adjust their strategies repeatedly, and become more aware of the way they learn. Their emotional and behavioral reactions when they encounter difficulties can shed light on their learning identity and learning flexibility. The experiential learning cycle is complete with the addition of after-game reflection, debrief, and discussion. Escape games are versatile and can be used to teach a variety of topics, such as problem-solving, creative thinking, teamwork, and leadership, in any kind of classroom, with any population of students. This article provides an overview of mobile app escape games, how instructors could use them in class, and examples of topics, games, and debrief questions to use.

Lessons on the Resource-Based View and Generic Competitive Strategies From Kinky Boots: The Musical

Kinky Boots: The Musical is a filmed version of the London West End production that tells the story of the unlikely collaboration between Charlie Price, inheritor of a struggling family business, and Lola, a high-energy and creative drag performer, who together radically change Price & Son’s focus from men’s dress shoes to fetish footwear. The musical lends itself well to use in strategic management and organizational behavior courses as a video case or source of video clips. This article explains how strategic management instructors may use the film to discuss sustainable competitive advantage through the resource-based view and generic competitive strategies, while organizational behavior instructors may use the film to illustrate concepts such as managerial roles, diversity, conflict management, and more.

Seeing Through the FOG: A Classroom Exercise Illustrating the Challenges of Sharing Information as Facts, Opinions, and Guesses in Teams

Information sharing is a critical aspect of effective team functioning. However, it can be challenging to discern whether the information communicated is fact, opinion, or someone’s best guess (FOG) due to the varied understandings, assumptions, and interests team members bring to any collaboration. In this article, we introduce a role-play exercise that helps participants better understand the complexities associated with information sharing in teams and how to sort through the FOG associated with information exchanges. Drawing upon research on motivated information processing, this exercise simulates the challenges of information sharing and assists teachers in demonstrating strategies to overcome them.

The Good Place in Your Classroom: Recommendations for Teaching Management Ethics

The sitcom The Good Place can be used by management instructors to teach ethical frameworks and concepts. This series, familiar to many undergraduate students in the US, features a Professor of Ethics and Moral Philosophy who gives mini lectures applied to what the characters are experiencing. These mini lectures can be shown to undergraduates studying ethics in a full course or as a subsection of courses such as management, organizational behavior, or leadership. This article provides information on particular clips that management instructors can use, recommendations for discussion topics with prompts provided, and a comparative pedagogical analysis of using this resource.

What Really Motivates You? A Data-Driven Exercise and Discussion

Why do I work? Despite instructors’ best efforts, students struggle to understand how different people answer this question differently. This exercise enables students to explore what motivates them in comparison to their peers and previous generations while reinforcing the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Students prioritize job reward factors, share their rankings to appreciate that people are motivated differently, and are given archival data to appreciate changes in workplace dynamics. This simple but thought-provoking exercise fosters rich discussions of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, self- and other-awareness, changes to the nature of the workplace, and differences in demographics, including generational age cohort, gender, and job level. This exercise is suitable for management or organizational behavior courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, using face-to-face and online formats, and synchronous and asynchronous modalities.