Robert F. Dennehy

The power of organizational storytelling: a management development perspective

Storytelling is a powerful tool that evokes visual images and heightened emotions. Business leaders who can tell a good story have tremendous impact. Presents a model and examples of organizational storytelling, discusses the use of stories in management development, and outlines ways to enhance managers’ storytelling skills.

Debriefing Experiential Learning Exercises: A Theoretical and Practical Guide for Success

To obtain optimum pay-off from an experiential exercise, close attention must be given to debriefing. The management educator must provide structure and ambiguity so that learners can personalize the learning-experiencing meaningfulness in its application-so that learning is truly relevant to the individual. An approach is presented to prompt participants to use new skills in the workplace based on a conceptual model for systematic and analytical debriefing, which is as rigorously planned as the experiential learning exercise itself.

Restorying Reengineering Some Deconstructions and Postmodern Alternatives

The authors deconstruct reengineering as an ideology inscribed in discourse of storytelling and metaphor used to justify the displacement of workers. The deconstruction unmasks reengineering as a false duality with bureaucracy, and in the end, just another reinvention of Adam Smiths division of labor. It is yet another chapter in the story of the displacement of labor by machines, especially computers, in the continuing industrial—now information—revolution. Reengineerings creator and principal salesperson, Michael Hammer, uses stories and metaphors of medicine, warfare, and revolution that script the fate of disposable workers. Disposable workers is restoried and sold as a way for American business to achieve profit, quality, and global competitiveness. The authors end by offering some postmodern alternatives.

Using Stories to Reframe the Social Construction of Reality: A Trio of Activities:

This article first presents the theoretical grounding for both storytelling and the social construction of reality. A sequence of classroom-tested tools for combining stories with reality construction is then described. Two tools for framing reality are offered: One is an actual frame that students take out of the classroom to frame a scene in different ways; the other requires students to frame two different segments of a photographic advertisement. In both exercises, students tell (either orally or in writing) the two different stories (perceptions of reality) they discovered. The third activity involves requiring students to gather stories and then retell them to classmates from the original story-teller’s perspective thus experiencing the reality of the original teller as well as discovering what their storytelling partner heard. The article concludes with a discussion of student responses.

Deconstructing the Organizational Behavior Text

Although the pedagogy of organizational behavior (OB) has made some progress in addressing gender, racial, and cultural diversity in the past decade, it remains essentially noncritical-politically, economically, socially, and ecologically. It continues to uphold positivist conventions, reinforce modernistic illusions of objectivity, and resist reflexivity. This article advocates that OB pedagogy in method and content, in particular teaching that involves the textbook as a basis of instruction, becomes more reflexive and self-critical, more aware of its presuppositions, interests, and limitations. This article demonstrates a postmodernistic strategy to counter the overly totalizing and positivist currents in OB teaching and texts—the deconstruction of taken-for-granted assumptions and principles. To this end, one of the top-selling textbooks in OB is subjected to deconstruction. The case for deconstruction as a potentially powerful classroom tool, an active and inclusive learning strategy that encourages readers to engage in dialogue with OB teachers and the authors of OB texts, is made.

Unreliability in Student Evaluation of Teaching Questionnaires: Focus Groups as an Alternative Approach

The conventional method used to measure teaching effectiveness is the student evaluation of teaching questionnaire (SET). Research on the validity and reliability of SETs is vast, though riddled with inconsistencies. The many “myths” of SETs are investigated and the incongruities are demonstrated. We hypothesize that the discrepancies in empirical studies come from misunderstanding and inappropriate actions by students. To address the complexity inherent in these problems, we suggest the use of focus groups as an alternative approach or complement to the standard SETs. A recommended format and guidelines for running classroom focus groups are provided. Institutional constraints and implementation concerns are addressed as well. This article lays the foundation for implementing a change in student assessment of teaching by proposing a method to compensate for bias in SETs, using focus groups as an evaluation tool, either as a stand-alone process or as a supplement to current methods.