Work motivation is a core component of many management courses. However, its effective teaching can be hampered by the fragmentation and seeming incoherence of the various theories of work motivation. To address this challenge, we describe an interactive role-play activity that induces students to synthesize, apply, and compare several theories of…

Workforce variables routinely place top-of-mind for corporate decision makers in choosing where to locate. This article presents an experiential exercise in which students simulate human resource consultants in a site selection exercise. Suitable for face-to-face or online classes, students work individually, pitching their chosen state to other…

This article presents an exercise designed to instill growth mindsets in business students and to demonstrate their effects on achievement motivation. The main points of the exercise are to introduce implicit theories of intelligence (i.e., fixed and growth mindsets), demonstrate that mindsets are malleable, apply growth mindset strategies, and…

This article describes a game show-style classroom exercise that is appropriate for any management-related courses that wish to enrich students' understanding of a key phase of the hiring process. The activity introduces the importance of job descriptions and job specifications through a semiscripted unstructured interview patterned after a…

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…

This experiential exercise is crafted around the classic board game Operation® (Hasbro 2008). Students are instructed that they are members of an emergency room team responsible for curing their patient of their ailments. However, unlike the board game, students in roles of doctors, nurses, and chief of surgery grapple with numerous sources of…

Undergraduate students, particularly those with limited experience in business, struggle to appreciate the complexity of organizational communication dynamics. Communication complexities such as role conflict, position power, and individual perception--and their influence on effective communication--are particularly challenging for this…

Universal Design (UD) involves the creation of accessible, flexible products that are functional for a wide population of users. Our problem-based learning exercise challenges student teams to create products and services guided by the principles of UD. After teams generate their new product concept, a spokesperson from each team pitches it in…

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,…

This article provides an overview of job design and offers an experiential teaching exercise to help students develop a better comprehension of job design and redesign, as well as learn the importance and challenges of such undertakings. Understanding the core elements of job design is especially important because job design serves as the…

Multiparty negotiations are a unique context in which three or more parties have different issues, priorities, and underlying interests. The Football Stadium Expansion is a four-person negotiation exercise that reinforces distributive and integrative negotiation skills (e.g., recognizing priorities, making concessions) as well as introduces three…

We present an experiential exercise to teach key principles of training design. Selected students participate in a self-learning cardiopulmonary resuscitation training program, CPR Anytime®, offered by the American Heart Association, while the rest of the class observes. The class then assesses the use of several training design principles in the…

There is a growing need to teach management students about the diverse gender identities they may face as managers and leaders in the workplace. Management educators are generally ill-equipped to teach transgender issues, even in diversity management courses. In this article, we provide two activities for supplementing education about transgender…

Personnel selection is a key topic in Human Resource Management (HRM) courses. Many selection exercises focus on management situations that are unfamiliar to students who are taking introductory HRM courses. In contrast, this exercise introduces students to the pre-interview steps in the personnel selection process by asking them to determine the…

There exists an "innovation gap" where students are not prepared to meet the demands of an increasingly complex world. Skills such as creative confidence help close this gap and also foster innovation. To better prepare students, two concepts, design thinking and experiential learning, are integrated through the use of a modified writing…