Which of these articles did you feel benefited your learning most, and why?

We read four articles on management education.

What level of Bloom’s taxonomy did these articles reach?

Would you have expected them to be more or less demanding than they were?

Which of these articles did you feel benefited your learning most, and why?

Articles Journal of Management Education 35(2) 198–226 © The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1052562910372806 http://jme.sagepub.com Positive Management Education: Creating Creative Minds, Passionate Hearts, and Kindred Spirits Fahri Karakas1 Abstract The goal of this article is to explore positive management education, a practice-based teaching and learning model centered on positive organizational scholarship. Six signs of transformation in organizations are presented: complexity, community, creativity, spirituality, flexibility, and positivity. A model for positive management education is introduced, based on six related dimensions: fostering integrative and holistic thinking, building a sense of community through high-quality relationships, developing creative brainstorming and skill building through innovative projects, integrating spirituality into the classroom, fostering flexibility and empowerment, and designing positive enabling, nurturing learning platforms. This positive management education model is illustrated through selected best practices from a pilot study of an experiential organizational behavior course. Keywords positive organizational scholarship, positive management education, creativity, community, complexity, inspiration, spirituality, passion, compassion 1 The Open University, IMPEL (International Management Practice Education and Learning) Centre, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom Corresponding Author: Fahri Karakas, The Open University, IMPEL (International Management Practice Education and Learning) Centre, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom MK7 6AA Email: fahrikarakas@gmail.com Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 Karakas 199 Years ago, I dreamed about teaching and about my future students. I always said to myself: “One day . . . I will design such a course that all students will love the experience . . . I will discover the pearl in each student . . . it will have a positive impact in the lives of my students . . . we will all learn from one another.” I am a humble, young, inexperienced traveler on the path of endless experimentation, inquiry, growth, and learning toward that ideal paradigm of teaching. I know I still have a long way to travel. I am deeply indebted to my students who shared their best skills, enthusiasm, commitment, creativity, time, and insights with me. How can we enable our students to become more engaged, creative, and passionate in their learning? How can we discover the best in our students? How can we create positive and supportive learning environments that provide trust and hope for our students? How do we reach out and bond with all our students? How can we build lifetime relationships with them? These questions are at the heart of developing tomorrow’s leaders who will act as agents of positive change to contribute to our common good in the 21st century. This article is an initial attempt to address these questions by introducing an approach to management education called Positive Management Education (PME). The objectives of this article are to introduce a model of PME based on positive organizational scholarship (POS), review six signs of transformation in organizations that affect PME practices, and describe six dimensions of PME and associated teaching practices and instructional strategies. PME is an innovative model of management education based on POS that aims to create positive deviance and flourishing in management education. PME is made up of the pedagogy, principles, and practices that nurture the best in students using POS principles (based on Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003). To introduce PME, I first review the approach of POS. Positive Organizational Scholarship POS is the study of what is positive, flourishing, and life-giving in organizations (Cameron & Caza, 2004). POS is a strength-based movement that builds on work in the fields of positive psychology, organizational sciences, and social sciences (Cameron & Caza, 2004). POS does not adopt one particular theory but draws from a wide spectrum of theories to understand, explain, and create the best of the human condition, positive deviance, flourishing, and vitality in organizations (Cameron & Caza, 2004; Cameron et al., 2003). Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 200 Journal of Management Education 35(2) The core premise of POS is that management and leadership excellence is fundamentally tied to creating organizational contexts that enable human strengths and unlock positive and generative dynamics of vibrant human communities (Cameron et al., 2003). This article is built on the assumption that scholars and instructors can benefit from POS in formulating positive principles and practices in management education. Application of POS approaches in management teaching and learning can provide innovative resources, methods, approaches, and pedagogical tools. The field of management education can benefit from a number of concepts in POS, including compassion (Dutton, Frost, Worline, Lilius, & Kanov, 2002; Dutton, Worline, Frost, & Lilius, 2006; Kanov et al., 2004), highquality connections (Dutton, 2003b; Dutton & Heaphy, 2003), virtues at work (Park & Peterson, 2003), courageous principled action (Worline & Quinn, 2003), and reflected best-self-portraits (Roberts, Dutton, Spreitzer, Heaphy, & Quinn, 2005). For example, management instructors can benefit extensively from theory and research on “high-quality connections” to develop better and more sustainable relationships with their students. Some POS concepts are already being used in management education, and the results are promising. For example, students at the University of Michigan compose their reflected best-self-portraits, which are defined as people’s self-construal of how they employ strengths and capabilities to create a positive experience for self and others (Roberts et al., 2005). Research conducted on 200 MBA students demonstrated that completing reflected best-selfportraits had positive impacts on self-identity, and receiving best-self-feedback enriched and broadened positive self-schemas (Roberts et al., 2005). Positive Management Education Model The PME model presented here is built on six signs of transformation sweeping organizations: complexity, community, creativity, spirituality, flexibility, and positivity. This article introduces six dimensions on which the PME model is based that are derived from these six signs of transformation. These dimensions are fostering integrative and holistic thinking, building a sense of community through high-quality relationships, creative brainstorming and skill building through innovative projects, integrating spirituality into the classroom, fostering flexibility and empowerment through individual attention and customization, and designing positive, enabling, nurturing learning platforms. Introducing the pedagogy, principles, and practices of PME is timely for a number of reasons. There has been a growing literature criticising Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 Karakas 201 contemporary management education and focusing on its problems over the last few years (Giacalone, 2004; Kochan, 2002; Pfeffer & Fong, 2002; Swanson, 2003; Swanson & Frederick, 2003, 2004; Walsh, Weber, & Margolis, 2003), as management scholars express their concerns and take a critical stance on a number of issues raised by business schools and management instruction (Bennis & O’Toole, 2005; Mintzberg, 2004; Mitroff, 2004; Pfeffer & Fong, 2002). Among these problems are the wide gap between theory and practice (Rynes, Bartunek, & Daft, 2001) and the threat of being irrelevant (Ford, 1994; Rynes & Trank, 1999). There is a growing literature on ethical and moral challenges in organizations (Schroth & Elliot, 2002) because of the increasing number of ethical scandals and frauds in corporations (Turnipseed, 2002). A multitude of causes and factors seem to exacerbate these org
anizational problems, such as increased uncertainty and chaos in today’s workplaces (Biberman & Whitty, 1997), increased stress and burnout of employees (Ashmos & Duchon, 2000), and declining job satisfaction and commitment of employees (Duxbury & Higgins, 2002; Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2003). On the global scale, organizations are also surrounded by complex problems such as global warming, postmodern terror, corporate scandals, pollution, and the divide between the rich and the poor (Karakas, 2006). As a result of these shifts, old management education models based on competition and hierarchy are not well suited to the global complexity, rapid change, and multifaceted challenges described above. There is a need for a better and deeper understanding of how POS can be used in management education as well as a description of the PME model and how it works and can be used in the classroom. Six Signs of Transformation and PME Much has been written about the extensive transformations and dramatic changes that are redefining the world of management and organizations. Management scholars have tried to describe these paradigm shifts in management theory and practice in the past decade (Capra, 1996; Giacalone & Dafna, 2000; Ray & Rinzler, 1993). The paradigm shifts we witness in management and organizations influence our management education context and practices. In response to these changes, organizations are designing selforganizing units, social innovation projects, creative ways of organizing work, meaningful work experiences, decentralized structures and flexible boundaries, and positive energy networks. The changing landscape of organizations can be characterized by the six signs of transformation (Figure 1). Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 202 Journal of Management Education 35(2) These six signs of transformation provide a holistic perspective on changes in organizations and illustrate the need for a new model of management education. They were selected as a result of a comprehensive literature survey based on the criteria of theoretical and practical relevance to the construct of PME. Each is explored through the relevant literature below. Complexity The first sign of transformation is the need for integrative, nonlinear, and dynamic thinking because of increasing complexity in management practices. This sign is evident in the changes from predictability to chaos (Gleick, 1987); 3) Sign of transformation: CREATIVITY Dimension: Creative Brainstorming and Skill Building through Innovative Projects 1) Sign of transformation: COMPLEXITY Dimension: Integrative and Holistic Thinking 5) Sign of transformation: FLEXIBILITY Dimension: Fostering Flexibility and Empowerment through Individual Attention and Customization POSITIVE MANAGEMENT EDUCATION 4) Sign of transformation: SPIRITUALITY Dimension: Integrating Spirituality into the Classroom 2) Sign of transformation: COMMUNITY Dimension: Building Sense of Community through High Quality Relationships 6) Sign of transformation: POSITIVITY Dimension: Positive, Enabling, Nurturing Learning Platforms Figure 1. Six signs of transformation and six dimensions of positive management education Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 Karakas 203 from simplicity to complexity (Lewin, 1992); from top-down control to selforganization (Kauffman, 1995); from closed systems to complex adaptive systems (Dooley, 1997); from Newtonian thinking to the new sciences of quantum physics, self-organizing systems, and chaos (Wheatley, 1994); and from mechanistic thinking to interconnected thinking based on quantum physics, cybernetics, and cognitive science (Rose, 1990). New management education philosophy is built on the deeper epistemological paradigm shifts in natural and social sciences in the past decades. As a result of the radical developments in complexity theory, quantum physics, and chaos theory, there has been a paradigm shift from a machine-based clockwork conception of the universe to a complex adaptive living system perspective (Wheatley, 1994). In response, management education scholars have written on integrating complexity sciences (Axley & McMahon, 2006; Fairholm, 2004), paradoxical thinking (Lewis & Dehler, 2000), and interdisciplinary perspectives (Ducoffe, Tromley, & Tucker, 2006) into the management curriculum and instructional methods. The dominant paradigm of education has been the shift from using static, repetitive, predictable, clockwork, and linear models toward using fluid, organic, dynamic, and biological models (Waddock, 2007). According to this shift, the brain is no longer viewed as a computer to be programmed but as a living, dynamic, and self-adjusting neural network. Moreover, learning is no longer a passive knowledge accumulation process; instead, it is a natural, dynamic, messy, and emergent process of pattern formulation and meaning construction in the new paradigm. Community The second sign of transformation is the recent focus on social responsibility and community well-being, evidenced by changes from technocentrism to sustainable development (Gladwin, Kennelly, & Krause, 1995); “bottomline” focus to multiple and balanced scorecards of success (Kaplan & Norton, 1993); an economic focus to a balance of profits, quality of life, spirituality, and social responsibility concerns (DeFoore & Renesch, 1995; Walsh et al., 2003); self-centeredness to interconnectedness (Capra, 1993, Rose, 1990); and self-interest to service and stewardship (Block, 1993; Neck & Milliman, 1994). Accordingly, there has been a thriving management education literature on caring and compassionate approaches to respond to social issues (Burton & Dunn, 2005), stakeholder engagement and sustainability (Collins & Kearins, 2007), and learning in community services (Bartel, Saavedra, & Dyne, 2001). The most striking and visible illustration of this recent focus on community issues in management education is the emergence and rise of service-learning Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 204 Journal of Management Education 35(2) as a viable and popular management education approach (McCarthy & Tucker, 2002; Vega, 2007). Service-learning is defined as a form of experiential education in which students participate in community service activities to apply and learn course concepts to develop an enhanced sense of civic responsibility (Bringle & Hatcher, 1995). Empirical research has demonstrated a number of benefits of service-learning for students, including the development of problem-solving skills (Bonar, Buchanan, Fisher, & Wechsler, 1996; Brown, 2000) and a deeper understanding of civic engagement, social responsibility, and ethical awareness (Salimbene, Buono, Lafarge, & Nurick, 2005; Stanton, Giles, & Cruz, 1999). The local community also benefits from student engagement and service-learning projects in a number of ways, as students bring their academic knowledge, tacit experiential knowledge, fresh insights, and vision for the communities (Peters, McHugh, & Sendall, 2006) to develop integral solutions to community problems (Valerius & Hamilton, 2001). Creativity The third sign of transformation is the prevalent usage of creativity and innovation in contemporary organizations. Organizations have introduced creative ways of organizing and work, such as building connections through networked organizations (Sproull & Kiesler, 1993), using swarm intelligence (Bonabeau & Meyer, 2001), or creating collective intelligence in knowledge work teams (Fisher & Fisher, 1998). In the globally connected and competitive business landscape, companies can no longer afford to rely entirely on their own employees’ ideas for innovation but must also leverage internal and external sources of creative ideas (Chesbrough, 2006; Nambisan & Sawhney, 2007). This model of innovation, which benefits from ideas coming from collaborators outside the boundaries of the firm, is called open innovation (Chesbrough, 2006). This shif
t is also referred to as the wisdom of the crowds (Libert & Spector, 2008) or group genius (Sawyer, 2007). Instead of relying on internal R&D groups, companies such as P&G, Google, or Boeing form trust-based long-term relationships with external innovators and customers to build vibrant and innovative business ecosystems (Nambisan & Sawhney, 2007; Tapscott & Williams, 2006). They tap into the global brain and benefit from the global talent pool to spur innovation and creativity in the digital ecosystem. A striking example illustrating the open innovation model is the case of InnoCentive, a global community of scientists from diverse disciplines and 170 countries that helps companies find solutions to their R&D problems (Nambisan & Sawhney, 2007; Tapscott & Williams, 2006). Open innovation methods centered on creativity and integrative thinking are becoming more important in the 21st century (Chesbrough, 2006) to find new ways to bridge Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 Karakas 205 some of the 21st-century problems, broader global issues, social divides, and poverty gaps (Waddock, 2007). In line with this shift, management education scholars have recently been including artistic and creative processes in their approaches to management education (Adler, 2006; Boggs, Mickel, & Holtom, 2007; Cowan, 2007; Huffaker & West, 2005; Pinard & Allio, 2005; Pink, 2004; Tung, 2006). Spirituality The fourth sign of transformation is the incorporation of spirituality at work, as seen in changes from materialistic to spiritual orientations (DeFoore & Renesch, 1995; Wagner-Marsh & Conley, 1999) and from rational systems with rules and order to a spiritual dimension of meaning, purpose, and a sense of community (Ashmos & Duchon, 2000; Conger, 1994). This change embodies employees’ search for simplicity, meaning at work, more humane workplaces, self-expression, and interconnectedness to something higher (Bolman & Deal, 1995; Marques, Dhiman, & King, 2007; Mitroff & Denton, 1999). Over the past decade, scholars report a dramatic and steady increase of interest in spirituality at work issues among management researchers and practitioners in North America (Ashmos & Duchon, 2000; Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2003). This growing interest is also evident in the business world, as large corporations such as Intel, Coca-Cola, and Sears incorporate spirituality in their corporate strategies and cultures (Konz & Ryan, 1999). The spirituality at work literature reports a number of benefits of incorporating spirituality into workplaces, including increased employee motivation (Krishnakumar & Neck 2002), increased commitment to organizational goals (Delbecq, 1999), enhanced organizational learning (Bierly, Kessler, & Christensen, 2000), and reduced absenteeism and turnover (Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2003). Spirituality at work has also been linked to improved organizational performance in a number of empirical studies (Giacalone & Jurkiewicz, 2003; Milliman, Czaplewski, & Ferguson, 2003). In line with this increasing interest in spirituality at work, there has been a growing body of literature on spirituality in management education (Barnett, Krell, & Sendry, 2000; Bento, 2000; Daniels, Franz, & Wong, 2000; Haroutiounian et al., 2000; Kerochan, McCormick, & White, 2007; Lips-Wierma, 2004; Marcic, 2000; Neal, 1997; Schmidt-Wilk, Heaton, & Steingard, 2000). Flexibility The fifth sign of transformation is the increasing level of flexibility and diversity in organizational forms and practices, such as flexible work arrangements Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 206 Journal of Management Education 35(2) (Gottlieb, Kelloway, & Barham, 1998), telecommuting (Kugelmass, 1995), executive coaching (Kilburg, 1996), empowerment (Byman, 1991; Rose, 1990), employee involvement and participation (Cotton, 1993; Hyman & Mason, 1995), and diversity programs (Gottfredson, 1992). Business leaders today need to develop a new level of awareness and adaptiveness to operate constantly in flux, with the rapid pace of technological innovations, globalization, financial shifts, reengineering, and mergers and acquisitions (Waddock, 2007). In this era of flexibility, organizations design new business models where millions of connected people collaborate and participate in innovation, wealth creation, and social development on virtual global platforms (Tapscott & Williams, 2006). As a result of these shifts, management education scholars emphasize students’ self-directed learning skills (Rhee, 2003), instructors’ response flexibility (Wheeler & McLeod, 2002), and student-directed learning (Kunkel, 2002). Mundhenk (2004) has written on the meaning of being student centered, contending that student centeredness goes beyond teaching techniques to being fully present with students and serving students’ learning needs in the best manner. Management scholars have also focused on the importance of being with students (Ramsey & Fitzgibbons, 2005) as well as showing flexibility, spontaneity, and attentiveness during classes (Mundhenk, 2004) to become fully present and mindful in the classroom. Positivity The sixth sign of transformation is the emergence and prevalence of strengthbased approaches in organizational sciences and management practice. Based on recent research on positive emotions (Fredrickson, 2003), positivity emphasizes the centrality of positive sentiments such as hope, inspiration, and joy as central elements to the change processes in human systems (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2005; Ludema et al., 1997). Strength-based approaches have gained popularity among management scholars and practitioners in the past decade (e.g., Buckingham, 2005; Buckingham & Clifton, 2001). The leading strength-based disciplines are positive psychology (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Snyder & Lopez, 2002), the original discipline and movement that provided inspiration for positive scholarship; positive organizational behavior (OB; Luthans, 2002a, 2002b), focusing on micro-level behavioral capacities; appreciative inquiry (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987; Cooperrider & Whitney, 2000), the main strength-based methodology of change in organizational development; and POS (Cameron & Caza, 2004; Cameron et al., 2003), the positive movement in organizational sciences. Of these disciplines, POS is the most critical for this article, Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 Karakas 207 as it forms the theoretical basis of the PME model. POS uses a broad spectrum of theories and concepts to explain and enable top performance, excellence, and vitality in organizations (Cameron & Caza, 2004). Each of these signs is distinctive, coherent, and powerful; yet when taken together, they help capture a comprehensive picture of the dramatic changes occurring in the world of management and organizations. Synthesizing these six signs of transformation provides the integrated perspective that is used to develop the multidimensional model of PME. The emphasis on “positive” is critical here, as these signs of transformation create a context in which there is a need for PME practices. These six signs of transformation form the bases of the six dimensions of PME. Course Description POS can be effectively used and applied in management education. I show this application using illustrative practices and exercises from an OB course. This section provides a basic description of the course, which was a required course for management undergraduate students, but they could elect from multiple sections offered at the university. The course was also open for undergraduate students in other departments and disciplines as an elective course. The student population was very diverse in terms of departments, majors, standing, and ethnic background. All the sections referred to in this article were offered in summer school, providing the instructor and the students options for creati
vity, flexibility, and empowerment. Each section had about 30 to 35 students and lasted for 7 weeks. The sessions were scheduled between 18:00 and 21:00 twice a week. The course was offered five times between 2005 and 2008. The course was designed as an integrative, innovative, and interdisciplinary course. Although it was a regular undergraduate course, the course was designed as an intensive OB and management trainee program aimed at developing leadership skills. As the course format was untraditional, the first week served as the orientation week and a testing ground for students. Many students dropped the course because they thought they were not ready or they would not be able to work intensively; others dropped it because they did not feel comfortable with the lack of a traditional structure. Other students added the course because they thought the course would be a rare opportunity for them to develop their professional skills through project work. What is important is that the instructor explained to students the nature of the course and the expectations very clearly. The result was the right mix of students who were eager and passionate about learning and professional development at an intensive pace. Students provided written feedback during the course using Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 208 Journal of Management Education 35(2) the university course evaluation system. Quotations from these evaluations and student comments are interspersed throughout this article. Course learning objectives were as follows: • To describe and apply the principles of OB to developing effective relationships with others in the workplace of the 21st century • To learn, evaluate, and interpret latest trends and changing paradigms relevant to OB and management across the globe • To develop integrative thinking and creative brainstorming skills through project work • To develop insights into the human psyche, to reflect on the self, to evaluate core strengths and weaknesses, to build on one’s own strengths • To develop proficiency in the use of managerial and interpersonal skills in a simulated challenging business environment and in a team setting Positive Management Education: Pedagogy, Principles, and Practices The PME model is based on six principles and practices: developing dynamic, holistic, systemic thinking skills of students; building a collective spirit and sense of community through deep caring, concern, love, and compassion; developing innovation skills and encouraging creative self-expression; developing a sense of meaning and interconnectedness by integrating spirituality into the classroom; deeply knowing students and designing flexible and customized learning experiences for them; and fostering hope and optimism in students, inspiring and mobilizing students through setting a positive climate for them. These dimensions can be seen as vital anchor points in crafting meaningful student engagement and learning. They constitute the pedagogy, principles, and practices of PME. Each of these six dimensions is associated with each of the respective signs of transformation introduced above. Figure 1 illustrates the PME model and indicates the relationships between six signs of transformation and the six dimensions of PME. Each dimension is illustrated below through associated pedagogy, principles, and practices, using examples from the OB course mentioned above. These practices and exercises are illustrative only. It is possible to adapt, customize, or replace these practices based on the specific learning needs of students. Fostering Integrative and Holistic Thinking In response to the sign of complexity, the first principle of PME is developing students’ integrative and holistic thinking skills. As organizational issues and Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 Karakas 209 problems become more multifaceted, multidimensional, and multifocused, students need to develop integrative, interdisciplinary, and holistic thinking skills to address these problems. To help them in this regard, I wrote a book with students, titled 100 Concepts for the 21st Century. I first conducted a series of intensive brainstorming sessions where students reflected on new changes and trends in the 21st century. Together as a class, we formulated a list of the top 100 concepts for managers and professionals to enable them to think holistically. All the students selected and wrote three chapters based on their own interests and passions. The resulting book was a comprehensive transdisciplinary list of concepts related to management, organizations, business, economics, society, science, technology, innovation, arts, politics, and the global agenda. The 100 short chapters in the book included social innovation, global corporate citizenship, appreciative inquiry, complexity sciences, web 2.0/web 3.0, quantum physics, and nano–bio convergence. The book is being revised with a plan to publish it. The social innovation is that students acted as coauthors of this book. Two students pointed out: This was the only course we were doing crazy stuff; like talking about Google’s innovation strategies, becoming part of the Pangea Day, viewing TED presentations, reading and summarizing . . . visionary books, brainstorming on quantum organizations, and what not! All at the same time! Course projects enabled us to think truly outside the box. We learned OB as well as beyond. We have even written a book, 30 co-authors working together. This is the big picture. The classic model of education is out of date; it was designed for our parents. It’s time for innovation. This course made me think more widely about my future jobs, new careers, lifestyles, social responsibility and community service. We were provided the opportunity to bring out the spirit of our leadership, team work, talents, ability and creativity that we have inside. Building a Sense of Community Through High-Quality Relationships In line with the sign of community, the second principle of PME is building a sense of community based on high-quality instructor and student relationships. The quality of the relationship between the professor and students is an important factor in the formation of a sense of community. I view this relationship as a lifetime holistic relationship: based on individualized mentoring and Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 210 Journal of Management Education 35(2) counseling, high-quality interactions, personal rapport and compassion, deep empathy and concern, and continuous feedback and interaction. To form a sense of community, students implemented service-learning projects called “What Will Be Your Legacy?” as part of their course work. These projects turned out to be transformational, positive, and enriching experiences as well as a collective journey of learning and growth for both the students and the instructor. In their service-learning projects, students reflected on human and organization dimensions of global problems and positive change as well as how they could achieve positive change in their spheres of influence. They chose a country and a context and designed a social innovation project, such as starting a nongovernmental organization that would have a positive impact on lives and well-being of people. Students then took an action to start their projects, such as designing a website, conducting a pilot research study, making a donation campaign video, or offering mentoring/guidance for youth. They took these initial actions in Montreal, or they used online tools to start their international projects. They shared their stories and learning with the class through a presentation and a blog entry. We allocated one session as an informal world café conversation in which students reflected on their service-learning projects. As each student shared a story, others asked questions and related to their own projects. The outcome was a sense of community based on shared human values and passionate storytelling. The positive energy and hope was contagious. As a
class, we reflected on our collective journey and learning on how we can improve our communities and the world. Throughout these courses, 90 students came up with 90 service-learning projects that were designed and applied in 32 different countries. Some of the titles of the legacy projects of students are the following: Reducing Pollution in Bangladesh, Overcoming Malnutrition in Honduras, My Contribution to Urban Development in Argentina, China Care, Fighting Childhood Obesity in USA, Fighting Poverty With Microfinance: The Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship in the Developing World, Examining the Crisis of AIDS in South Africa, and “First Step” Program for Immigrants in Canada. As several students reflected, We even had our chances to reflect on “what will be our legacy” and the opportunity to implement it in our communities, which is amazing. My project was about designing a wheels-on-meals service for elderly people in the ghetto, and I am so excited to implement it and see the results. This course was cutting edge in terms of the relationship between the professor and us. We have a lifetime relationship, and we feel part of a Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 Karakas 211 very special network of professionals. We know that the professor cares about us, and he will communicate with us after the course is over. Creative Brainstorming and Skill Building Through Innovative Projects In line with the sign of creativity, the third principle of PME concerns developing creative and innovative skills of students through experiential, project-based learning and applied skill development. Students are encouraged to focus on their independent learning for their careers, making their projects really useful for their own goals and life. They are supported to be creative and innovative and generate breakthrough projects for the future. As part of this “Creative Mindworks” project, students wrote innovative articles for publication in business magazines and the media. This project enabled students to expand their vision by doing research and brainstorming about breakthrough global issues and ideas in management and organizations. Students had total freedom to select subjects they felt passionate and curious about. The idea was to find inspiring, creative, intriguing ideas. Students built analogies between management and music, arts, politics, microbiology, psychology, health care, chess, agriculture, or quantum physics. The topics varied from String Theory to the collective behavior of ants or bees. Some students looked at the past 5 years of “Breakthrough Ideas” of Harvard Business Review (2004-2008), analyzed recurrent themes across 100 breakthrough ideas, and wrote an integrative article about what they thought would emerge next. One student came up with the project of McGill TED Platform inspired from the TED conferences (“Technology, Entertainment and Design,” www.ted.com), where McGill students would share their most creative ideas on science, business, arts and global issues with each other in 18 minutes. Another student analyzed the 2008 Fast 50 list of the world’s most innovative companies and generated a business magazine piece on what makes a company innovative. Many students experienced for the first time in their lives how it was to publish a piece they had written. The titles of the following projects illustrate the range, depth, and creativity of students’ thinking: The Emperor Penguin as a Model for Corporate Teams; Quantum Skills, Leadership, and Music: The Parable of the Orchestral Conductor; Fast Innovation and Spider Networks; Building Bridges: Corporation/Management and Architecture/Keystone; An Integrated Art, Science, and Design Fair: Expo3I, Inspiration, Imagination, and Innovation; Spiral Dynamics and the Global System; and The 21st Century Organization: Designed from the Human Body; and so on. Some students commented: Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 212 Journal of Management Education 35(2) I loved the fact that there were no midterms, quizzes or finals in this course. It was performance evaluation based on project work, which reflected real life. This has been an interesting and rewarding course blending creativity, entrepreneurship, innovation, teamwork and management skills. We reflected on plenty of current global future issues and concepts surrounding 21st-century entrepreneurs. The video clips were excellent for learning, and the handouts were very inspiring and were absolutely useful for the future. Integrating Spirituality Into the Classroom In line with the sign of spirituality, the fourth principle of PME is integrating spirituality into the classroom. I define spirituality as the embodiment of an individual’s more balanced, profound, creative, and peaceful side. This principle involves embracing students as whole persons, acknowledging them having not only cognitive but also social, emotional, and spiritual faculties. There is a need for bridging creative, reflective, spiritual, and artistic sides of students to bring out the best in themselves. The objective is to provide opportunities for students to explore meaning or purpose in their lives; express their yearning for transcendence, joy, and creativity; and experience a deep connection to themselves, others and the wholeness of life. Students submit a project called “Reflection and Artwork,” where they reflect on what they learn in the course creatively and insightfully. Literature demonstrates that creativity is positively associated with spirituality, higher self-awareness, and intuition (Freshman, 1999; Guillory, 2000; Harman & Hormann, 1990). The project is centered on the link between creativity and spirituality. There are no format requirements or restrictions. Thinking out of the box; students create personal diaries, journals, pictures, stories, concept maps, videos, book drafts, CDs, and OB games. Students express themselves through various media, such as music, dancing, singing, poetry, and painting. This project enables them to express their inner gift of creativity, spiritual self, and authenticity. Many projects have surpassed the instructor’s expectations in terms of the depth of spirit, reflection, insight, integration, and synthesis. We organized an exhibition of these projects in the final ceremony (last class). Some of these reflection projects included the following: an art gallery of compelling images for the 21st century; design of a spirituality workshop and creativity incubator; a video summarizing the spirit and essence of the class; a Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 Karakas 213 recipe for self-reflection and leadership in the 21st century (prepared in a cooking book format); a gift box including reflection quotes, inspirational stories, self-awareness cards, and flowers; an OB comic book: “A Caveman in the 21st Century”; a web 2.0 tool on authentic networks and spiritual circles; and “The Survival Book: What It Is to Be a Human in the 21st Century.” Students’ responses to this assignment include the following: It has been a wonderful, spirit-nourishing experience for us. Personally, in this class, I did not feel like a student number but more like a person. We were not seen as a statistic to be graded in this course. We were treated as professionals and as whole persons. This course is the first one I’ve ever taken in which the professor is so enthusiastic about the material and has high hopes and expectations about all his students. I really like the fact that you want to get to know each student personally and that your goal is too create a path to achieve our goals, but not to mention, strive for higher and more. Fostering Flexibility and Empowerment Through Individual Attention and Customization In line with the sign of flexibility, the fifth principle of PME deals with attention to each student and customization based on student needs. Each student is seen as an individual having different dreams, hopes, goals, and future aspirations, with unique gifts, talents,
strengths, and skills. Assumptions are that students will be committed and inspired if provided with the freedom to create their own customized projects based on their strengths, dreams and passions; and students will be more motivated if they develop rapport and individualized interactions with the professor. In this section, I share some of my personal insights on the relationship between the instructor and students that have influenced my teaching philosophy. I believe that it makes a great difference to care about students, develop rapport and sincere relations, meet with each of them, build a lifetime relationship with them, and provide them customized attention, guidance, and feedback. Over and over, I have witnessed the tremendous impact and power of love in facilitating student learning. When I reflect back on my own courses and instructors, I detect the same pattern: The courses that I learned most and performed best were offered by the professors I loved most. The more students love their instructors, the more they will be Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 214 Journal of Management Education 35(2) authentically engaged in their learning. To form a lifetime relationship with our students, we need to know them. I acknowledge the inherent difficulty of trying to form a lifetime relationship with each student in the middle of tremendous research pressure and multiple academic commitments, because many of us are teaching more than 100 students each semester. I was able to form and sustain a personal relationship with my students because I offered my courses in 2 months in the summer semester and focused solely on my teaching during these 2 months. In my experience, I have seen that investment of extra time and effort pay off. Devotion to students has not been depleting; in contrast, it has been extremely rewarding, enriching, and energizing for me. We indeed formed lifetime relationships, going beyond the formal course contract. Note that I had 35 students at a maximum one semester, and I was teaching for only 6 hours every week. However, I had to allocate at least 60 hours each week for my students to be able to provide them individualized coaching and mentoring. The most difficult part was providing customized, detailed, high-quality feedback during the evaluation of five different projects for each student in each course. I acknowledge that this model may be very difficult to implement in our traditional university settings. However, even if we are extremely busy, we can consider incorporating some elements of customization and coaching in our courses, for example, an initial reflection assignment at the start of the semester. Such an assignment can enable the instructor to know the students more deeply: their past, their family, their values, passions, career plans, and dreams. I try to do something similar in the first week through the first project: “Career Portfolio for Your Dream Job.” In this project, students prepare a detailed portfolio to apply to their “dream job” after graduation, and I act as the HR director of their dream company. The career portfolio students submit includes an updated current CV, a cover letter, an ideal future CV, a personal strategic plan, a personal form, and a visual self-reflection exercise. To bridge the gaps between their ideal career paths and their current situation, students design a two-page personal strategic plan outlining their goals. Students complete the Personal Form, providing information on their major successes, their reflection and learning from their failures, course expectations, hobbies, personality, what they want to change in their lives and careers, contributions they want to make for their communities, and what they feel passionate about. Students also reflect on their role models, personal values, mission and vision. Finally, students draw a picture or a diagram on a white page reflecting on their personal values, goals, passions, and dreams. These portfolio elements are confidential. I review all these Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 Karakas 215 portfolios on the weekend and conduct 15- to 20-minute interviews with each of the students during the second week. Using appreciative inquiry principles (Cooperrider & Whitney, 2000), we discuss their career plans, passions, and strengths, as well as how we can make this course and course projects most useful for them. I provide guidance, mentoring, and coaching for each student and student team every 2 weeks. These meetings develop rapport and clarify expectations. Some student comments are listed below. I find the applicability and flexibility of the course the most effective and useful so far, along with the different modes of teaching that the professor uses. It makes a big difference that the professor seems to really care about the course making a difference in students’ lives, that it is not just a “memorize and regurgitate to me” course. I have always found that an instructor’s attitude and true interest in students’ learning is the biggest factor of how impactful a course is. This course is less structured and allows room for adapting to students’ individual lives, hopes and dreams. Other courses seem to not wholly care whether or not students actually learn and integrate material into their lives or if the students forget about the course the moment they leave the last class, but this course really applies and adapts. It tailors individual needs and interests that kept me excited and extremely willing to put in extra hours to develop my projects and myself. Positive, Enabling, and Nurturing Learning Platforms In line with the sign of complexity, the sixth principle of PME is to create positive, enabling, and nurturing learning platforms for students where they can grow intellectually and spiritually. The main objective is to find, reveal, and develop “the best, the most positive, and the most creative” in students. This dimension involves practicing positive instructional values and principles to create a positive learning atmosphere for students. I believe that students perform at their best in a positive climate based on hope, inspiration, passion, creativity, encouragement, and compassion. This is the reason why I prepare positive surprises for every class to make sure that every meeting is exciting, enjoyable, and rewarding for students. The positive surprises have included outdoor team training programs, funny videos on leadership, accomplished leaders as guest speakers, knowledge competitions among teams, simulated board meetings, and video recording of team performances. Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 216 Journal of Management Education 35(2) Acknowledging that the brain is a pattern-seeking, living system that grows in rich and dynamic environments, PME enables students to learn and grow in positive platforms. It carries utmost importance to inspire students by discovering their strengths and passions and building on them. By sharing their own enthusiasm and passions (free of fear and stress) teachers encourage students to do the same. There is substantial research that supports the importance of positive emotions, images, and expectations in enabling positive transformation and upward spirals of human functioning (Cooperrider, 1991; Fredrickson, 2003). Student responses include the following: Keep being passionate about the topic! It’s great to have a teacher and a course like this one. Keep it up! When the students decide to invest themselves in the course, they can really learn a lot. This class was probably the best one I had so far. It demanded me to learn in different ways and to learn for myself. I really loved taking this course. VERY encouraging and student centric learning environment! Professor did best in inspiring the students toward the future and giving us a new joy to learn in Management. His encouraging attitude toward the course let us fully express ourselves throughout the course. Because of this course, I am feeling more positive and more op
timistic about possibilities of the future. The course really emphasizes the “no boundaries” and “you can do it” mindset. Assessment of Student Learning To assess students’ learning outcomes and skill development, I use a multidimensional performance evaluation for each course project. A sample performance evaluation rubric included the following criteria, which were derived from the learning objectives of the course: • Depth, rigor, and knowledge basis (usage and learning of OB theories, materials, readings, and principles: quality of content) • Insight and vision (evaluation of changing OB trends and paradigms, future vision, paradigm-breaking ideas: quality of ideas) • Applicability, contribution, and impact (practical application of OB knowledge, innovation potential: quality of practical implications) Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 Karakas 217 • Creative and integrative thinking (demonstration of out-of-the-box thinking, creativity, integration of concepts: quality of thinking) • Self-reflection and self-expression (evaluating own strengths and weaknesses, clear articulation of values and passions: quality of self-reflection) I write a performance evaluation to each of my students after I evaluate each of their projects. I provide them developmental feedback and suggestions on each of the criteria. I write a personal letter, with the tone of the feedback always constructive. As the semester unfolds, I witness a 15% to 35% increase in students’ performance results in course projects (on average), which demonstrates the effectiveness of customized projects, constructive feedback, and one-to-one mentoring. I perceive how we were transformed by the collective learning experience and positive atmosphere of these summer courses. I select the best and most creative student projects every week and present special awards for the most creative and innovative miniprojects. I announce the “top three” champions at the beginning of each week’s class and invite these students to present how they conceptualized and created their masterpieces. They share their projects with the whole class. This practice is effective because it set a positive tone for the semester and the upcoming week, it encourages and motivates students beyond grades, students learned from other students, and the celebration inspires the group as a whole. Limitations and Boundaries The PME model I have presented in this article has some limitations and boundaries. First, although this course has been offered five times in two different countries, the learning outcomes may not be generalizable to different cultural contexts and different samples of students. The principles and practices of PME will need adaptation for different courses offered for various student populations across different countries. For example, PME practices are more convenient for developing soft skills such as interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence. Therefore, it is expected that PME will be more compatible with qualitative and/or applied courses such as human resources management or leadership. Moreover, the PME model more easily fits courses that require creativity or have a component of project work. Therefore, marketing, strategy, and international business courses would fit better than accounting or economics. However, instructors offering quantitative and technical courses may still consider incorporating a creative and customized project into their courses. Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 218 Journal of Management Education 35(2) Second, the projects presented above may not work for all students. Several students have dropped the course because they felt that traditional course sections with exams were more appropriate for them. PME as demonstrated in this article seems to work better for students who are open to new experiences and new modes of learning, such as project-based work, teamwork, and creative art work. Third, PME is a difficult model to emulate and apply, given the time and space constraints of our academic institutions. Management instructors are dealing with multiple commitments, deadlines, and pressures. Knowing and meeting each student, providing mentoring and guidance, evaluating performance and progress, delivering high-quality customized feedback, and designing personal learning and developmental experiences take tremendous time and effort. Nevertheless, instructors may consider incorporating some elements of flexibility and customization, spiritual reflection, creative project work, and mentoring in their courses. Nagging Questions for Management Instructors in the 21st Century How do we reconcile our profession with the deepest of our humanity and human values? How do we design and create inspirational, supportive, and positive learning environments for our management students? How do we build lifetime relationships and high-quality connections with our students— irrespective of religious, racial, economic, and cultural differences? How do we enact, enable, and empower a community of learners with creative minds, passionate hearts, and kindred spirits? Although it is impossible to address fully these questions, I hope that this article will contribute to the overall conversation on the use of strength-based methodologies in management education and make a difference by burning a spark for a positive change in our academic and teaching environments. Using this article, management instructors can design and deliver management courses that operate on PME principles and thus learn more about enabling a positive learning community where students feel connected to their inner selves, their colleagues, and their community. POS urges that we replace the prevalent mechanistic, materialist, profitoriented, function-based paradigm with an integrated, dynamic, and systemic vision of a sustainable learning community that reflects universal human values and global consciousness. The PME model, inspired by POS, aims to increase intellectual, social, spiritual, and emotional engagement of both students and instructors. PME urges us to create new patterns, new instructional strategies, and new environments that support and celebrate creativity, inspiration, and spiritual growth. Downloaded from jme.sagepub.com at CAPELLA UNIVERSITY on April 14, 2015 Karakas 219 This article is an initial exploration toward a model of management education that can offer positive change in the lives of our students as well as our own. Offering courses based on the PME model and seeing the potential benefits of applying these strategies changed my whole life, how I see my academic journey, as well as where I see promise in our profession of management teaching. PME pedagogy, principles, and practices have awakened me to the transformative potential and deep positive change we can lead in our lives, in our professions, and in the lives of our students. This new way of thinking in management education may have profound impacts on how we prepare our students for the social, spiritual, emotional, moral, and ethical challenges of the 21st century. Author’s Note I dedicate this article to all my students and all my teachers who have inspired and supported me in my journey to become a more devoted teacher. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article. 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‘” Acadeojj’o/ Management Leaining and Education, 2002, Vol. 1, No. I, 9B-I06. Damned by Our Own Theories Contradictions Between Theories and Management Education LEX DONALDSON The Universities of New South Wales and Sydney Universities create and widely disseminate knowledge. Yet. in their management schools, some ol the theories presently being used contradict the premises of management education. In economics and finance, the theory of efficient markets means that gains cannot come from trading upon knowledge made public through management education. Strategy theory aims for sustained competitive advantage through rare resources or positioning, but knowledge only weakly assists the development of rare resources, and disseminating knowledge about strategy through management education destroys its competitive advantage. Agency theory leads to doubts that managers will use enhanced knowledge to benefit the organization and, while specifying controls to curb managers, it also doubts that these controls will be applied. Institutional theory pictures organization as ritual more than rationality; the key function of managers is public relations, through manipulation of the truth in a way inimical to educational values. Studies of judgmental biases reveal flaws in managerial judgments, rendering moot the idea of gains from equipping them with superior knowledge. A sounder approach is to emphasize theories that identify effective managerial practices. Education is a core mission of all universities. For schools of business and management a key issue is whether they are improving practice. Modern business and management schools draw heavily on social science theories and are proud that their educational curricula have this basis. However, for some presently popular theories, there is reason to doubt that their role in management education is always beneficial, because the theories are incompatible with management education in various ways, as this article explains, leading to the suggestion that management schools may need to be more careful in future in the prominence they give to different theories. Note that in discussing management education we are concerned with the education of both experienced managers (i.e., “executive education”) and of future managers (i.e., MBA and undergraduate management education). The traditional approach taken in management Thanks to Daniel Lovallo, Richard Priem, Thomas Powell, and James Bailey for comments. education sees managers as unintentionally destroying the value of their organizations through managing in ways that fail to make the most of the resources under their control. Lost performance is seen as due to wrong actions based on errors in thinking. These errors are not intended by the managers, and are due to deficiencies in their knowledge. The solution is to enhance managers’ knowledge, leading to better managerial practice. Where there is uncertainty about the best practice to achieve a desired outcome, research that creates new knowledge remedies it. When this new knowledge is communicated through management education, managers will act on it, changing their practice, so that performance becomes closer to the optimal. This view embraces a whole raft of practices such as human resource management, quality management, managerial accounting, organizational design, strategic planning, and so forth. Such a relationship between knowledge and management is at the core of business schools as centers for vocational education. Inherent in this view 96 2002 Donaldson 97 Lex Donaldson is that managers are rational and pro-organizational, and only need to be given better tools through education. By derivation, more conceptually oriented education can give management students an understanding of the ideas that underlie sound practices, so that they can creatively adapt these ideas to solve the novel problems they face throughout their careers. This view undergirds the argument that modern business and management education should emphasize fundamental theoretical concepts. The search for knowledge has led, particularly from the late 1950s onward, to the fostering of the social sciences to study business and management (Eastman & Bailey, 1994), especially in university graduate schools, but increasingly also in undergraduate university colleges. This entails the deployment of theories from economics, psychology, sociology, and other social scientific disciplines, most of which are valuable additions to the study of management. However, unless done in a discerning manner, the reliance upon social science theories to supply the knowledge taught in business and management schools can lead to problems. The thesis of this article is that there is a contradiction between the views expressed by some major contemporary social science theories taught in management schools and the assumptions on which management education is founded. [T]here is a contradiction between the views expressed by some major contemporary social science theories taught in management schools and the assumptions on which management education is founded. The five views examined here, economics and finance {taken together), agency theory, strategy theory, institutional theory, and judgmental bias theory, are all, in their different ways, in conflict with one or another basic premise of management education. While these five theories are only some of the social science theories used in schools of business and management, they are important theories therein, and so merit attention. Finance (Brealey & Myers, 1996) and the related subject of economics (Samuelson, 1980) are seen by many people as being at the core of the modern business school. Agency theory is the analytic framework used by experts in finance and economics to analyze managers (Jensen & Meckling, 1976), dominates topics such as corporate governance and executive compensation (Dennis, 2001), and enjoys considerable influence in organizational theory (e.g., Kosnik, 1987). Strategy is widely accorded the status of being the capstone course in MBA programs, and the resource-based view (RBV; Barney, 1991) and positioning theory (Porter, 1980) are major strategy theories. Institutional theory is the most influential contemporary organizational theory (W. W. Powell & DiMaggio, 1991) and encapsulates the contribution from sociology for many business and management school faculty. Judgmental bias theory enjoys the standing in business and management schools of being a contribution from the science of psychology and is featured in organizational behavior textbooks (Vecchio, Hearn, & Southey, 1996). While a number of these theories have been subject to various criticisms previously (e.g., Donaldson, 199Qa,b, 1995; T. C. Powell, 2001; Priem & Butler, 2001), the focus here is on the incompatibility of these theories with management education. I now critically discuss, in order, the theories of economics and finance, strategy theory, agency theory, institutional theory, and judgmental bias theory. In closing I briefly advocate a theoretical Academy of Management Learning and Education September approach that is compatible with management education. ECONOMICS AND FINANCE The most highly rational view of the behavior of individuals and firms is found in economics and in a discipline derived from it, finance. Here the central idea is that markets are efficient because there are many competitors who are always striving to find some imperfection that would allow them to profit. However, their vigilance to new information and their speedy actions render any such imperfections, at best, short-lived. The striving of so many people to create, or find, some imperfection in the market drives out these imperfections and causes it to move to equilibrium. Thus, the players end up being forced to take merely the normal rate of profit. Applied to product markets, this means that it is difficult for firms to sustain any competitive advantage. Patents expire, firms succeed in reverse engineering competitors’ products, secrets leak, and firms are highly vigilant to every piece of ne
w information. The assumption of economics is that firms and their managers are rational—if only because those who are not rational fail to survive in the competitive struggle (Friedman, 1953). Thus economics tends to hold that firms will readily adopt any beneficial new practices once their managers acquire knowledge about them, through means that include management education (subject possibly to agency problems discussed below). In this regard, the implied view of management education is positive in that education in better practices can contribute to the efficiency of firms. However, the rapid adoption of new, beneficial practices by firms, through knowledge made readily available from management education, precludes any one firm maintaining an advantage over its competitors, so that firms will tend toward the merely normal rate of profit long term. Applied to equity markets, finance theory argues that equity markets are semistrong-efficient (Fama, 1991). As Shleifer explains, “The semistrong form of the EMH [Efficient Market Hypothesis] states that investors cannot earn superior riskadjusted returns using any publicly available information. Put differently, as soon as information becomes public, it is immediately incorporated into prices, and hence an investor cannot gain by using this information to predict returns” (2000: 7, emphases in original). This means that the prices in the stock market reflect all that is publicly knowable about the firm. New knowledge about the firm that affects its price allows an investor who is the sole possessor of this knowledge to have a temporary advantage over other investors. However, given the incentive for other investors to acquire that knowledge, as soon it is publicly available it is rapidly acquired by many investors. Once many people possess the knowledge, it can no longer confer any advantage upon its possessors. Thus the view of major equity markets is that many investors swarm around looking for imperfections that would allow them to “buy cheap and sell dear.” As a result, new information affecting the stock price of a company quickly diffuses around the market. (Only half-jokingly, finance experts say that information passes through markets “at the speed of light, because that is the speed at which electricity passes through telephone lines.”) Therefore the stock price compounds all extant information (“it’s all in the price”), so that no stock is really undervalued or overvalued. This makes impossible the systematic buying of bargains through valid forecasting of future stock prices. Hence it is not possible to make above-normal profits from trading stocks, other than temporarily from luck (apart from illegal means such as insider trading). Thus in efficient markets, be they for products or equities, the players, whether firms or investors, tend only to make normal profits long term, even though the players are rational, striving for success, and receptive to new knowledge. Thus research-based knowledge, once public, confers no economic advantage in (even semistrong) efficient markets. Only knowledge that is kept private can confer an advantage to the investor. The usual academic process of publishing the results of research places them in the public domain, thereby neutralizing any competitive advantage. Thus, from the viewpoint of an investor seeking to become rich through buying and selling stocks, there is no point in research that makes its results public, so that academic research can have no value for playing the stock market. Stinchcombe explains the significance of efficient stock markets for management education: If a strategy thinker has figured out a better measurement device, if she or he has actually figured out a “system” in the race-track-tout sense, then that information will be soon incorporated into the firms’ stock market price. It won’t do business school students any good in beating their competitors by the time they get a job (2000: 280). Thus, to the degree that markets are efficient, economics and finance caution that knowledge made publicly available through management ed- 2002 Donaldson 99 ucation cannot assist its students to better play these markets. STRATEGY AND SUSTAINED COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE The resource-based view (RBV) of the firm has become an increasingly dominant theory of strategy (Priem & Butler, 2001: 22-26). Barney (1991) holds that sustained competitive advantage comes from a firm having valuable resources that are rare, nonsubstitutable and inimitable, in which the barriers to imitation are unique historical conditions (i.e., path dependence), causal ambiguity, or social complexity. However, these resources and barriers are only to a limited degree amenable to management education. Barney states that the rare, valuable resources of a firm can result from its endowment, (1991: 116, 2000: 262, 263) that is, patterns set at the founding date (Stinchcombe, 1965). However, clearly, competitor firms cannot possess such endowments if they were “born” at the “wrong” time, regardless of the education of their managers. Also a firm may possess special resources through luck (Barney, 2000: 299, 2001: 50fn; Henderson, 2000: 288; Priem & Butler, 2001: 36). However, special resources cannot be reliably created by luck through management education. Further, Barney states “that many of the attributes of resources that make them likely to be sources of sustained strategic advantage—especially path dependence and social complexity—are not amenable to management manipulation” (2001: 49), so they cannot be amenable to management education. Again, Barney (1991: 109-110) states that, for causal ambiguity to prevent imitation, the people in the firm must not understand the causality—otherwise competitors could hire them and gain the knowledge. Management education would try to remove the ambiguity about causality, through developing researchbased knowledge, and so is inimical to a causal ambiguity barrier. Nevertheless, Barney (2001: 49-50) argues that the RBV is useful in helping firms sustain competitive advantage, by enabling them to recognize the rare, valuable, inimitable resources that they happen to have, so that they maintain and nurture them. For firms that do not already have rare, valuable, inimitable resources, competitive parity is the most they can hope for (Barney, 2001: 49). What is missing from these managerial implications is how the managers of a competitor firm could use the RBV to gain the sustained competitive advantage described therein. However, if RBV could offer prescriptions for competitors to emulate the leading firms, then those firms would not enjoy sustained competitive advantage, which would subvert the theory, Barney recognizes this problem and is explicit that knowledge of the RBV does not create the special resources that produce strategic advantage—he writes scathingly of the folly of thinking there can be a “rule for riches” (2001: 50). Thus being educated in the RBV gives the managers of competitors little guidance about how to attain competitive advantage. The emphasis of the RBV (Barney, 1991) is upon developing skills, technologies, administrative systems or organizational cultures that are unique to the firm (Porter, 1996; T. C. Powell, 1995). To remain unique, these special resources necessarily cannot be explained in the specifics that would allow management education to prescribe them to competitors. Accordingly, the descriptions of the unique competences that are used to exemplify the resource-based theory of the firm are vague (e.g.. Porter, 1996). Overall, there is a contradiction between the RBV and management education, which cannot create special resources or barriers to imitation, or even specify the special resources. More generally, there is a contradiction between sustained competitive advantage and publicly available knowledge. Any strategic advantage of a firm that rests on knowledge which is disseminated through management education cannot be sustained, because that knowledge is available to competitors. The knowledge may be about its unique resou
rce or competence, as in the RBV, or about strategic positioning (Porter, 1980), or effective combinations of strategy and structure (Chandler, 1962; Hill, Hitt, & Hoskisson, 1992), or any aspect of strategic management (Heene & Sanchez, 1997). The firm could possess the knowledge in tacit form (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995), or use an argot or language not understood outside the firm, which prevents competitors from imitating it. However, if this knowledge becomes codified, that is, explicitly stated in public language or symbols, then it can pass to competitors. Thus turning organizational knowledge into public knowledge has the potential to destroy the source of a firm’s success and the superior profits that flow therefrom. Therefore, a firm may seek to keep the knowledge secret. This point was thrown into sharp relief by an incident at the Academy of Management. A senior manager from Ford gave a presentation about the company. Then a member of the audience asked him to describe Ford’s strategy, but the manager said that Ford managers were under instruction not to disclose the company’s strategy to outsiders. The audience was stunned, and another member shouted: “Does that apply to Harvard Business IDO Academy of Management Learning and Education September School?” “Especially to Harvard Business School!” the manager replied. The audience was stunned, and another member shouted: “Does that apply to Harvard Business School?” “Especially to Harvard Business School!” the manager replied. Knowledge-based sustained competitive advantage is incompatible with management education. Creating such knowledge and making it public through research publication and education makes the ideas available to a firm’s competitors. Knowledge can initially confer competitive advantage on the firms that adopt early an improved practice, but the advantage expires when competitors adopt the practice, for example, the multidivisional structure (Armour & Teece, 1978). Academics and universities possessing such knowledge typically advertise it and its benefits, then make the knowledge available for the price of a book or a few days of executive education, which fosters diffusion among the competitors in an industry. As Stinchcombe puts it candidly, “When the strategy experts get. .. winners, and diagnose their strategies, then they should be able to pick winners from among startups that have that strategy, and make a mint, until the information gets incorporated into the market through business school teaching” (2000: 282). AGENCY THEORY Agency theory is widely taught in management schools. It states that managers, as agents, act in ways that maximize their self-interest at cost to their principals, the owners outside the corporation, who lose value (Jensen & Meckling, 1976). These agency losses include managers being lazy, taking excessive salaries, empire-building, or diversifying—all of which reduce the profits for the owners. Managerial objectives include money, status seeking, and risk avoidance. Agency theory holds that principals can reduce agency losses through monitoring, sanctioning, and bonding mechanisms (Jensen & Meckling, 1976). In agency theory problems are seen to occur because managers have divergent interests from owners. Therefore giving managers more knowledge about more effective management practices is no guarantee that agency losses will diminish. Managers might use enhanced knowledge gained through management education to further their self-interest, becoming more sophisticated and devious in their misappropriation of shareholder wealth. Thus there is a tension between agency theory and management education in general. The concern has been expressed that educating students in agency theory could induce them to act more selfishly. Presenting agency theory in formal university courses increases awareness of the possibilities of managerial delinquency, implies they are normal, and confers some legitimacy on them. In the journal of Applied Corporate Finance a professor of finance warns: … if we go on hammering into our students the mistaken notion that rationality is identical with self-interest, we shall gradually make our agency models come true, but at the cost of producing a society that will not function. For, as I have argued, and contrary to popular economists’ misconception, unbridled self-interest leads not to utopia, but to the Hobbesian jungle where, as in parts of our cities, life is nasty, brutish and short (Brennan, 1994: 39). Jensen (1994: 45) has replied that his students are already aware of conflicts of interest in organizations, prior to their exposure to agency theory. Nevertheless, management education in agency theory may still encourage the problems it depicts. Agency theory might be held to be useful in assisting people to anticipate and prevent agency losses. This might be through management education teaching owners, directors, and top managers to apply controls on middle- and lower-level managers. However, agency theory argues, in economic fashion, that the market has already adjusted to agency problems by putting in place the controls that reduce them (Fama & Jensen, 1983), so there would be no further economic gain to be had from increasing controls through more management education. In contrast, other statements of agency theory assert that the incentive controls required to prevent agency losses are to a considerable degree absent in organizations. Managers fail to install adequate incentive controls on their subordinates, because the managers themselves are not under adequate incentive controls. This process works all the way down the organizational hierarchy from the board of directors. As Baker, Jensen, and Murphy state: The absence of incentives to structure efficient compensation contracts permeates the corporate hierarchy—up to and including the compensation committee of the board of di- 2002 Donaldson 101 rectors whose task is to design executivecompensation contracts. Boards of directors, who often own only a trivial fraction of their firm’s common stock, are in no sense perfect agents for the shareholders who elected them. Board members are reluctant to terminate or financially punish poor-performing CEOs for the same reason supervisors are reluctant to punish subordinates—they personally bear a disproportionately large share of the non-pecuniary costs, but receive essentially none of the pecuniary benefits. The effect of structuring CEO contracts that are independent of performance is likely to cascade down the hierarchy—each successive layer has fewer incentives to structure effective contracts than the prior layer. The absence of incentives is pervasive, and it is not surprising that large organizations typically evolve into bureaucracies (1988: 614). Thus the agency problems at lower hierarchical levels endure because of agency problems at upper levels. As a result, educating managers in agency theory about the need for more controls would, in many firms, not lead to their implementation. Hence within agency theory itself there are arguments that counter the idea that educating managers in the theory will cause them to more effectively curb agency losses. Overall, there is a tension between agency theory and the mission of management education. In particular, by publicizing managerial delinquency, agency theory may encourage these behaviors. Furthermore, the theory itself says that its solutions are either unneeded or unimplementable. INSTITUTIONAL THEORY Institutional theory argues that organizations conform to norms held in their environments about sound organization (Meyer & Scott, 1983). Conformity comes from taking things for granted, adherence to norms, coercive sanctions, or the desire to gain legitimacy and resources from external organizations and professions (W. W. Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). The implication is that the managers running organizations are following unconscious “taken-for-granteds,” or seeking certainty in the face of causal ambiguity, or, more calculatively, trying to make their organization look go
od to an external audience. The bold claim of institutional theory is that organization is not about rationality, but about ritual and conformity to some ideology, such as the ideal of bureaucratic rationality (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). The stress on ritual over rationality runs the risk of undermining the educational mission of universities to promote reason in their students and in their alumni who are managers. Institutional theory posits a process of institutional isomorphism, whereby organizations come to resemble the other organizations in their organizational field (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). Students who whole-heartedly adopted institutional theory would, as managers, seek to make their organizations more like the other organizations around them. This would mean adopting the same processes, outputs, and prices as competitors, the opposite of the organizational strategies of differentiation and low-cost that strategy theory argues are beneficial (Porter, 1980). Again, just copying other firms in the industry contradicts research that the optimal organizational characteristic is not uniform across all organizations but is contingent, for example, that structure should follow strategy (Chandler, 1962; Rumelt, 1974). Thus variations across organizations are beneficial, even within the same organizational field (e.g., industry). Bettis states that, instead of the “suppression of vaiiance . . . the world today is one in which a primary imperative that organizations face is the encouragement of variance” (2000: 168, emphases in originaJ). Similarly, the emphasis on conformity to the norm overlooks the importance of innovation, which is a valuable strategy for many organizations and managers (Bettis, 2000). Too full intemalization of institutional theory by management students might lead them to overlook innovation, with negative consequences for their organizations and themselves. Thus acting out the conformity story of institutional theory would lead a manager to adopt suboptimal strategies and structure. Hence the message from institutional theory is contrary to that which much management education has been at pains to point out. In institutional theory, conformity leads organizations to adopt a structural feature even if it yields no operational efficiencies (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). The implication is that much of managing is putting on a show for the environment, through impression management or dissembling. This downgrading of operational effectiveness in institutional theory could discourage students from learning about how to improve operations or, when they become managers, from implementing these improvements, despite the benefits of such for their organizations and careers. Institutional theory can win ready acceptance with MBA audiences because it with chimes with the popular cynical view that “everything is just for show” or 102 Academy oi Management Learning and Education September “just window dressing.” Thus, far from there being a problem of having this academic sociological theory accepted in management schools, its instant credibility may run the risk that other theories are seen as naive. Traditionally, management education has taught about organizations adapting so as to become operationally more effective over time, through managerial problem solving. This whole perspective, and the sometimes complex analyses of tasks and organizational elaboration that it entails, could be undermined by too much institutional theory early in the curriculum. Emphasis on institutional theory could pander to populist nihilism or anti-intellectualism, so that education in other theories that deal in real improvements might be endangered. A possible implication of institutional theory for management education is to assist managers to project the institutionally legitimate image of their organization by educating students about the ideologies in their institutional environments. This would include familiarity with the fads and fashions of management, and how they rise and fall over time (Abrahamson & Fairchild, 1999). In so far as management schools themselves create the management fads, students have the advantage of drinking at the source, so that they enter organizations with an understanding of—indeed as carriers of—the next “breaking” fad. However, fad-mongering is inimical to traditional university values about the truth, so allowing institutional theory to strongly influence the curriculum would compromise the core mission of universities. Many academics are hostile to fads and seek to debunk them and, thus, would not welcome a strong influence of institutional theory on the curriculum of management schools. Overall, institutional theory has an uneasy place in management education. It may encourage managers to be nonrational, adopt the wrong strategies and structures, be noninnovative, focus on impression management, downgrade operational effectiveness, and embrace fad and ideology—all contrary to university values. JUDGMENTAL BIASES Another view of managers departs strongly from viewing them as rational decision makers. Instead, managers are seen as subject to judgmental biases in their decision making that stem from defects in the ability of humans to process information, leading them to frequently make poor decisions. Decision making is depicted as being infected with biases of many kinds, coming from emotional and other factors, including overconfidence, optimism, hindsight, and overreaction to chance events (Kahneman & Riepe, 1998: 53-56). Also, managers may be affected by the judgmental biases of loss aversion, implicit favorite, selective perception, and personal experience (Vecchio, Hearn, & Southey, 1996: 361-363). Again, managers may become dysfunctionally overcommitted to existing lines of business through the escalation of commitment (Staw, 1981), so that they may spend millions of dollars on reinvestments in mature industries, such as on capital expenditures or research and development, which have no economic value and, on the contrary, destroy shareholder wealth (Jensen, 1986). Those subject to judgmental biases in decision making include the highest governmental officials, such as U.S. presidents (Janis, 1972). These biases are capable of producing catastrophically wrong decisions, such as the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco and the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster (Whyte, 1989). If top governmental officials, with, supposedly, access to the best advice, can err because of systematic flaws in human judgments, then it would seem that organizational management would be ubiquitously prone to error. Thus, inherent defects in human rationality could potentially cause massive performance losses for organizations. The solutions offered are primarily ways to approach decisions so as to minimize the biases and defects in those decisions. This is a different approach from the more traditional one of training managers in management practices, which tends to assume that managers are capable of deciding rationally and just need access to better knowledge. On the contrary, judgmental biases theory sees the problem as not being lack of knowledge, but rather poor application of knowledge because of impaired judgment. Better knowledge, established through research and communicated through education, would not overcome the problem, which according to the theory of judgmental biases, are inherent in the frailty of human cognition. Indeed managers are seen as being so incapacitated by their biases that a recommendation is that outside advisers need to be used to give an unbiased perspective (Staw, 1981). Thus the view that there are strong biases inherent in human cognition is a major objection to claims that education of managers is beneficial. It constitutes a pungent challenge to management education. There is the possibility, however, that through educating managers about judgmental biases they may become better able to recognize and overcome their biases. Also, by using improved decisionmaking processes, managers may avoid these traps. For example Kahneman and Riepe recom- 2002 Donaldson 1
03 mend a number of procedures to reduce the optimism bias, including these two: “Resist the natural urge to be overoptimistic. . . . Because you are more likely to remember your successes, keep a list of past recommendations you made that were not successful” (1998: 54). However, education and new decision-making processes also have to overcome the biases, so that the new thinking is not overwhelmed by the same factors that drive the biases, for example, emotions. If biases are as strong and pervasive, as their proponents hold, how can we have confidence that education will be strong enough to counter them? Education gives concepts and facts, but the judgmental biases work to overcome these rational processes. The problem is that, the more persuasive these theories are about cognition being biased by strong forces that are deeply embedded in human nature (e.g., “Resist the natural urge to be overoptimistic” [Kahneman 8f Riepe, 1998: 54], emphasis added), the less credible is the idea that they can be corrected by education. Moreover, the conditions under which the biases are stronger may be those inherent in management. For instance, Staw (1981) argues that escalation of commitment is stronger where the person is publicly associated with the past policy, a condition that is likely for people in managerial roles. To the degree that management education about judgmental bias theories, or about processes to combat them, can be demonstrated to decrease judgmental biases, they should be given a correspondingly large place in the curriculum. However, establishing the efficacy of such interventions would show that the biases are not really that deep-seated. Therefore, logically, resolving questions about the extent, magnitude, and robustness of judgmental biases should really be a precursor to even attempting management education. The justification for management education hangs on showing that the biases are not strong or common, or that they can be overcome, all of which are in theoretical tension with the idea of judgmental biases. IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGEMENT EDUCATION Management education does not fare well at the hands of these five theories, which, nevertheless, have become more influential in management schools over the past 3 decades. Hence the collective challenge that they pose to the traditional ideas about the educational mission of management schools is increasing, constituting a significant problem for such schools, albeit one that has mainly gone unremarked to date. I have highlighted how these theories contradict management education. If they are viewed as being empirically valid, then the implication of some is that management education is fruitless and should be abandoned. As instances, we have seen how agency theory says, infer alia, that managers will pursue their own self-interest at the cost of the owners, and institutional theory says, inter aha, that managers will uncritically follow the latest fad. However, there are grounds for doubting the empirical validity of both agency and institutional theory (Donaldson, 1995). Regarding economics and finance, and strategy theory, as we have seen, their usefulness for managers is less than often supposed. Therefore, the contradiction posed for management education by most of these theories should be resolved by siding with management education, rather than with these theories. Accordingly, in their educational curriculum, management schools should reduce their reliance upon the theories of economics and finance, strategy theory, agency theory, and institutional theory. Management school use of judgmental bias theory needs to focus on whether its use induces managers and management students to think more rationally, to better fit the presuppositions of education. Fortunately, other areas of social science theory are more compatible with the educational mission of management schools, and they should receive additional emphasis in future by those schools. The curriculum of management education should draw upon knowledge that offers theoretical models of a kind that managers can use, causal models in which the causes are variables that managers can influence (e.g., HRM policies and practices) and the effects are variables that managers care about (e.g., performance; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). Thus such theoretical models tell managers which levers to pull to bring about the outcomes they seek. Some models are universalistic, in that they hold that adoption of a practice, for example, management-by-objectives (Rodgers & Hunter, 1991), raises performance in all organizations. Other models are contingency models, which hold that highest performance results from adopting the practice that fits the situation, for example, divisionalization fits diversification (Chandler, 1962; Donaldson, 2001; Rumelt, 1974). A key requirement for theories to be managerially useful is that managers can decide whether to adopt a particular practice, rather than having its adoption decided by some other, powerful person (e.g., an outside shareholder) or body (e.g., the government). Thus managers need to have the power and other capacities to implement the new practice (Pettigrew, 1973). For example, the theoretical T •• 104 Academy of Managemeni Learning and Education September models must feature, as their causes, organizational characteristics (e.g., leadership style) that are mainly within the organization, rather than in its environment, and mainly in the formal structure (i.e., official, managerially determined), rather than the informal structure (i.e., not directly controllable by management). Thus, the theories used in management schools need to feature managerially relevant independent and dependent variables, rather than just pursuing whatever theories are on offer in the social sciences. A good social science theory of organizations explains them, but a managerially useful theory also empowers managerial action. As discussed, because academic theories readily become public knowledge, they can confer only a temporary competitive advantage before the improved practices they cause become common. However, in the period before they are common, which can be lengthy (Donaldson, 2001), the improved practices can contribute substantially to organizational performance. When they are common, every organization needs to use these practices in order to attain competitive parity, that is, to not be at a disadvantage (T. C. Powell, 1995). Hence, the knowledge about practices that management education imparts helps produce some improvements in organizational performance, even though management education cannot produce the high, long-run organizational performance that would result if it could create sustained competitive advantage. Thus the contradiction between sustained competitive advantage and management education does not render management education as making no contribution to organizational performance, but it does place limits on the duration and magnitude of the resulting performance improvements. Organizational performance is being conceptualized here in competitive, relative terms, such as sales and profit, whereby one organization wins by taking sales (and hence profits) away from its competitors. Other aspects of organizational performance, however, are not relative, but are attributes of an organization in itself, for example, quality, measured as the absence of defective products or services (e.g., surgical procedures in a hospital). Publicly available knowledge can lead to sustained higher levels of performance in these terms, because an improvement in the performance of an organization is not reduced by an improvement in the performance of its competitors. Therefore university management education can help increase organizational performance in these terms for the long run. Organizational performance in competitive terms, such as profits, benefits the shareholders and other stakeholders of a particular organization. In contrast, organizational performance in noncompetitive terms can benefit society much more widely, for example, mass consumers benefit from more reliable autom
obiles, and citizens benefit from more effective procedures in hospitals and schools. Thus, while public knowledge cannot provide sustained benefit for private interests (e.g., the owners of a firm), it can provide sustained benefit for the public interest, which is a mission of many, if not all, universities. CONCLUSIONS Some contemporary social scientific theories of organization contradict the assumptions of management education. Economics and finance argue that many major markets for products and equities are so efficient that public knowledge cannot confer advantage on persons trading therein. Strategy theory advocates attaining sustained competitive advantage, but knowledge that is published and disseminated through education cannot be the basis of rare organizational resources or other strategies that provide sustained competitive advantage. Thus management education can lead, at the most, to temporary competitive advantage. Agency theory posits that managers can lack the motivation to use new knowledge to maximize the performance of their organization. The theory describes means that could be used to control subordinates, but argues that pervasive agency problems make managers unlikely to adopt these needed controls. Institutional theory casts doubt on organizational rationality, holding rituals to be the basis of much organizational structure and action. Management is viewed as being about conformity, rather than distinctiveness and innovation, and is not a search for operational effectiveness, potentially undermining attempts by management education to enhance organizational efficiency through better knowledge of practices by managers. Moreover, institutional theory implies attention to ideologies and fads, a mission about which management educators are liable to be ambivalent, at the least. Judgmental biases theory implicitly questions whether managers are capable of the rationality presumed by management education. Conceivably, educating managers about biases may reduce those biases, but the view of human judgment and decision making in the theory is not an encouraging one for management educators. Taken together, these social science theories are quite influential in modern management schools, presenting problems for contempo- 2002 Donaldson 105 rary management education. Their place in the curriculum should be reduced or qualified. A preferable approach is to foster theories that improve managerial decision making by specifying the causal connections between managerially valued outcomes and the practices managers can adopt to bring them about. By emphasizing such theories, management education can produce for organizations important but impermanent gains in competitive performance and more enduring gains in the noncompetitive aspects of their performance. 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Discussion Participation Scoring Guide https://courserooma.capella.edu/…/institution/BMGT/BMGT8810/Version0114/Scoring_Guides/discussion_participation_scoring_guide.html[4/14/2015 3:10:51 AM] Due Date: Weekly. Percentage of Course Grade: 30%. DISCUSSION PARTICIPATION GRADING RUBRIC Criteria Non-performance Basic Proficient Distinguished Applies relevant course concepts, theories, or materials correctly. Does not explain relevant course concepts, theories, or materials. Explains relevant course concepts, theories, or materials. Applies relevant course concepts, theories, or materials correctly. Analyzes course concepts, theories, or materials correctly, using examples or supporting evidence. Collaborates with fellow learners, relating the discussion to relevant course concepts. Does not collaborate with fellow learners. Collaborates with fellow learners without relating discussion to the relevant course concepts. Collaborates with fellow learners, relating the discussion to relevant course concepts. Collaborates with fellow learners, relating the discussion to relevant course concepts and extending the dialogue. Applies relevant professional, personal, or other real-world experiences. Does not contribute professional, personal, or other real-world experiences. Contributes professional, personal, or other real-world experiences, but lacks relevance. Applies relevant professional, personal, or other real-world experiences. Applies relevant professional, personal, or other real-world experiences to extend the dialogue. Supports position with applicable knowledge. Does not establish relevant position. Establishes relevant position. Supports position with applicable knowledge. Validates position with applicable knowledge. Participation Guidelines Actively participate in discussions. To do this you should create a substantive post for each of the discussion topics. Each post should demonstrate your achievement of the participation criteria. In addition, you should also respond to the posts of at least two of your fellow learners for each discussion question-unless the discussion instructions state otherwise. These responses to other learners should also be substantive posts that contribute to the conversation by asking questions, respectfully debating positions, and presenting supporting information relevant to the topic. Also, respond to any follow-up questions the instructor directs to you in the discussion area. To allow other learners time to respond, you are encouraged to post your initial responses in the discussion area by midweek. Comment to other learners’ posts are due by Sunday at 11:59 p.m. (Central time zone). DISCUSSION PARTICIPATION SCORING GUIDE PRINT