Developing skills in soliciting, receiving, and responding effectively to critical or negative performance feedback is at least as important as delivering feedback well. Organizational Behavior courses, however, focus almost exclusively on teaching students how to deliver feedback. The purpose of this scenario-based classroom exercise is to…

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…

The six-sentence argument (6SA) is an exercise to train critical thinking skills. Faced with a decision situation, students argue for their preferred course of action using a logical structure of exactly six sentences. Through a guided peer review, students engage critically with other students' arguments and receive detailed feedback on their own…

Critical thinking requires that we dig beneath the surface of organizational issues to explore multiple views, context, and aspects of knowing. In this exercise, students explore these deeper issues with the question: Are incentives effective? A hypothetical case unfolds to show how two consulting groups can arrive at very different…

Critics of ethics education suggest that students need to learn about contextual pressures of workplace ethical decisions and develop skills to handle them. Thus, instructors are often challenged to integrate an ethics unit into organizational behavior courses in ways that complement, rather than duplicate, what may have been covered in their…