Situational leadership is a popular management training tool, yet scholars criticize the model's limitations and conflicted empirical support. Management educators are left with a lack of clarity on how to present situational leadership, and this article seeks to address the gap in teaching practice. The experiential role-play activity presented,…

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 experiential exercise teaches students what constitutes Appreciative Inquiry and how it is different from other feedback models, along with giving students the opportunity to apply their knowledge. Students practice giving Appreciative Inquiry to their peers' presentations through the use of an online platform that allows for written words…

For organizational change to happen, people have to change their behaviors. Leaders of organizational change therefore need to develop their abilities to influence others, sell issues, and overcome resistance to gain buy-in within organizations. This article describes the framework for a semester-long project in which MBA students practice these…

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…

Although many global MBA programs teach intercultural communication, what happens when the method for teaching that concept becomes mostly experiential? To answer that question, the authors took two very similar classes, both composed of working adults, a Business Communications course in Germany and a Managerial Communications course in the…

Diversity courses cover a variety of relevant topics, but it is difficult to convey the dilemmas those with stigmatized, invisible social identities may encounter in the workplace. This exercise attempts to situate students in the perspective of both the person with the invisible identity and those who may unintentionally place that person in a…

Organizational change remains one of the challenging concepts for students in leadership and organizational behavior classes to internalize if they have not experienced it directly. This exercise serves as a means for simulating the change process through a firsthand experience of change at a personal level. The assignment involves students…

Supply chain management (SCM) is a complex business discipline because it combines the concepts of forecasting, inventory management, logistics and distribution, vertical and horizontal integration, and global issues. This complexity creates a challenge when teaching the concepts to both undergraduate and graduate students. A web-based computer…

This article presents an experiential exercise where students learn the basics of social network analysis, relate social networks to social capital, and analyze their own networks in the classroom. Instructors of all types of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels can use this activity to teach students about social networks and…

Helping students connect abstract concepts to concrete situations is often a challenge. Students who are unable to make the basic connections are at risk of spending the semester and beyond misunderstanding key points and their application. In this article, we provide a framework that includes debriefing, bridge building, and assimilation to help…

Management instructors are continually challenged to create learning activities in online courses that duplicate the same opportunities to develop managerial skills afforded to students in traditional face-to-face courses. The purpose of this experiential exercise is to provide online students an opportunity to develop the soft skills all managers…

Many students ignore or underappreciate the important role that financial and accounting considerations have on the formulation and implementation of realistic and ultimately effective strategies. This article describes an exercise that helps build the ability to integrate strategic thinking with financial analysis. Its purpose is to help students…