Steven Meisel

“Choose the Future Wisely”: Supporting Better Ethics Through Critical Thinking

Most people learn and internalize their sense of ethical behavior many years before they assume positions of organizational responsibility. Continued training in ethics helps to develop new understanding and supports ethical behavior. It is also useful to increase the cognitive skills of executives making decisions affecting firms and stakeholders. One key to ethical executive decision making is the further development of critical thinking skills. This article looks at the relationship between critical thinking, organizational uncertainty, and ethical behavior. It also describes an instructional design using a series of business vignettes for executive action with uncertain functional and ethical outcomes.

Videotypes: Considerations for Effective Use of Video in Teaching and Training.

The power of television in modern society is beyond dispute. The ability of television and video to captivate an audience and create maximum impact can easily be harnessed for training and teaching. Instructors will find that video ‐ when used properly ‐ will enhance virtually any presentation. Video in training and teaching must be used carefully and considerable thought and preparation is needed. This paper presents ideas and information on different types of video material, including their sources and most effective use. It concludes with notes on copyright to help ensure your presentation is both successful and legal.

The Mock Trial A Dynamic Exercise for Thinking Critically About Management Theories, Topics, and Practices

The Mock Trial is an experiential exercise adapted from a law school process that encourages students to think critically about theories, topics, and the practice of management in an innovative classroom experience. Playing the role of attorneys and witnesses, learners ask questions and challenge assumptions by playing roles in a trial with testimony and cross-examination. Once a theory or topic has been chosen to be “put on trial,” one team of petitioners (challengers) and their witnesses make arguments to a jury. Another team acts as the respondents (defenders) for the opposing side and presents their case in a mock courtroom setting. The jury renders a verdict using a fishbowl format for their deliberations. Then feedback and classroom debriefing, which immediately follow the trial, and later reflection papers help solidify the learning experience. All materials required to create, run, and assess a Mock Trial are provided in this article.

Rethinking Management Education: a TQM Perspective

Business, labor, and government leaders have acknowledged that improving the quality of products and services is key to competitiveness in both the global and the domestic marketplaces. Quality improvement has been implemented successfully in the entire spectrum of organizations: manufacturing and service firms; small, medium, and large entities; union and nonunion environments (Berger, 1991). The Total Quality Management (TQM) movement has been the primary vehicle for change in organizational thinking about quality processes. Although many colleges and universities offer courses in TQM or attempt to apply TQM in their business operations, few use this model as a framework to examine the basic processes of education. This article is intended to share experiences and stimulate ideas about improvement of our primary service. There has always been a tension regarding the appropriate balance of teaching and research in academia. But during the past few years, there is evidence that this balance has moved toward an increased emphasis on the process and outcomes of teaching (American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business [AACSB], 1991; Boyer, 1990; Vance, 1993). More specifically, the accrediting group is now focused on the improvement of the entire learning system (curriculum, course design, instruction, etc.) through the use of customer feedback, more efficient use of resources, team-based structures, and measurement of educational outcomes. To this end, many colleges and

The New Leadership Construct: What Happens When A Flat Organization Builds A Tall Tower?:

When the Block Tower Building Game surfaced some 25 years ago, itwas designed toillustrate the managerial skill of directing subordinates in exactly how to “stack up” the results required by management. However, in todays more horizontal organizations with a premium placed on nonhierarchical leadership of a diverse workforce, teams are achieving “toweringly” higher results. This article discusses aspects of the new organizational realities and presents a tower building exercise redesigned for the 1990s. Modification reflects new thinking about effective organizations and new ways of interpreting the emergent organizational dynamics. The exercise examines the issue of who really leads in nonhierarchical, self-managed team settings.

Teaching A New Generation: The Differences Are Not Trivial

As organizational behavior learners apply managerial knowledge in classroom exercises or in the field, the hidden knowledge they hold of the cultural context of these applications works spontaneously to create meaning. This contextual knowledge is developed profoundly in our formative years; thus tacit experiential knowledge differs by generation. Todays college-aged Millennials see organizational life and OB theory differently than yesterdays Gen X, or Baby Boomer cohorts. These differences are revealed in an exercise using the vintage (1982) and current editions of the board game Trivial Pursuit. This activity asks learners to find the presence of generationally-cultivated knowledge in their daily lives and consider its effect on their use of OB theory. The experiential exercise is also linked to field interviews and other activities related to understanding generational differences in world view.

Leadership is in the eye of the beholder

This article does not have an abstract.

The Constructivist Approach to Learning

The Teaching & Learning section of the Organization Management Journal has been open to many approaches to classroom innovation. The common thread has always been to find interesting ideas that might provoke new ideas and new techniques that interest our students. The two articles presented in this issue do that in interesting and unusual ways. The first of these articles is “Using the Three Stooges to Illustrate the Scientific Method,” by Steven M. Dunphy and Joe Dobson. Regarding the use of the Three Stooges as a bridge to the scientific method, you are probably thinking, “Well sure, who doesn’t do that?” But don’t be hasty in your judgment. Dunphy and Dobson have a thoroughly engaging article on teaching a subject that is famously cut-and-dried in its presentation. The second article is “You Want Me to Trust You? Using Adventure Learning to Teach Millennials About Trust,” by Kathleen J. Barnes, George E. Smith, and Madeline Constantine. A quote from the authors of our second article actually helps to frame the use of the Stooges as a teaching tool for today’s students: “Foremost among [our] challenges is finding teaching approaches and methods that hold the potential to compel this cohort to question their existing models and beliefs about what they already believe to be real, unchangeable, and immovable in their lives and life experience” (p. 255). The need to question models and beliefs is exactly what will make both these articles interesting to OMJ readers. In explaining student engaged education, the website of the University of California (UC)–Davis Center for Experiential Learning has this to say about the topic:

A Novel Methodology for Configuring a Job Satisfaction Matrix

The purpose of this research is to provide a job satisfaction matrix for further clarification of the interrelationships between individual emotional exhaustion, job properties, and organizational factors of job satisfaction. Job satisfaction was evaluated through the use of a novel, fuzzy rule-based algorithm. Interviews were conducted to generate data on the effective factors of job satisfaction. Following interview analysis and using categories suggested by the interview data, questionnaires were generated offering linguistic choice to support the qualitative aspect of job satisfaction. A stratified sampling technique was employed to find a sample of interviewees for the questionnaires. The job satisfaction matrix provides further clarification of the interrelationships between individual factors and is track-able in time intervals for identifying the dissatisfaction factors. The research demonstrated that by using the weighted scores of the data, strategies could be suggested to fill the gaps between ideal and reported satisfaction outcomes.

Developing the competencies of interactional justice

Grounded in social exchange theory, interpersonal and informational justice (collectively “IJ”) reflect the degree to which people affected by organizational decision makers perceive that they have been treated in a dignified and informative manner. Empirical research shows that IJ is positively correlated with myriad beneficial organizational outcomes (e.g., performance, job satisfaction and trust in authority figures) and negatively correlated with several noxious ones (e.g., withdrawal, negative reaction to decisions). The presence of IJ is an important mitigating factor in accepting negative organizational outcomes. In addition, the negative impact of injustice on an individuals self-esteem can have profound implications for relationships among organizational stakeholders. The platform for introducing learners to IJ is a skills-based design for identification and use of fair behaviors. The experiential exercise is also designed to facilitate observational skills in seeing the consequences of IJ in organizational life – particularly as its presence or absence affects the communication flow in various interactions between managers and their subordinates.