Marine Agogué

Understanding collaboration is central to management education, yet it is often approached through verbal, cognitive, and performance-oriented pedagogies. We propose an art-based initiative designed to foster a more subtle understanding of collaboration by encouraging reflection on participants’ engagement in a dynamic relationship and by cultivating an understanding of listening beyond silence, including attentiveness to others’ aesthetic expressions. In this article, we present an experiential exercise based on abstract painting and silent co-creation that invites participants to explore nonverbal communication, embodied awareness, and relational attunement. Drawing on embodied collaboration and aesthetic theories, the exercise is particularly effective for highlighting tacit dynamics such as esthetic expressions of oneself, boundaries, power dynamics and embodied synchronization. We detail the pedagogical foundations, learning objectives, step-by-step implementation, and debriefing questions. This exercise can be used at the graduate level, in courses on leadership, organizational behavior, or communication, as well as in executive training.

Creativity has become increasingly critical for decision‐making, particularly at upper organisational levels where male‐dominated teams remain prevalent. While a substantial body of research has examined the relationship between gender diversity and collective creativity, far less attention has been paid to numerical gender dominance in creative teams, and especially to the dynamics of male‐dominated configurations. In this paper, we address this gap by examining how men's behaviour unfolds in male‐dominated teams and how these patterns translate into team dynamics and creative outcomes. Using a framed field experiment involving 55 male (and 33 female) experienced managers, we investigate how male‐dominated teams composition shapes men's contributions to collective creativity. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we show that men in male‐dominated teams contribute fewer ideas, resulting at the collective level in fewer ideas and across fewer categories. Grounded in social role theory, we further identify three underlying mechanisms. First, men in male‐dominated teams are less likely to engage in idea bouncing, i.e., building on previously generated ideas. Second, they provide less positive feedback on peers' ideas. Third, they report higher confidence in their performance, fostering a satisficing tendency that reduces persistence in idea exploration. Taken together, our findings show that ideation is particularly constrained in male‐dominated contexts and point to actionable managerial implications. Beyond simply promoting gender balance, they highlight the need for targeted interventions to mitigate these gendered dynamics and foster more effective collective creativity.

Management educators regularly innovate by designing and/or integrating experiential exercises into their classrooms. Many then endeavor to publish their exercises in academic journals, providing readers with a roadmap for how to use them in their classes. To convince colleagues that an activity helps students learn, authors will often include evidence demonstrating its impact. Importantly, there is a dearth of research exploring the types of evidence authors use to do so. We analyzed 185 articles presenting in-class management-related experiential exercises, published across seven journals between 1 January 2018 and 1 June 2024. In so doing, we contribute to the literature by synthesizing the ways in which authors demonstrate the effectiveness of their activities. We offer both a portrait of current practices and framework of strategies (by source, type, and preparation required) that prospective authors may draw on as they reflect on impactful ways to structure upcoming data collection efforts. We are, however, mindful that most authors in our sample were affiliated with institutions in North America. As norms regarding evidence for experiential exercises are collectively shaped by journal expectations and authors, we reflect on how our methodological choices contribute to shaping practices about what “counts” as credible evidence in management education.

Although the proportion of women in academic positions has increased, women researchers continue to receive less media coverage than their counterparts. To examine the implications of this underrepresentation, we investigate how different audiences respond to women researchers’ increased visibility in social sciences dissemination media. We conducted two laboratory experiments, the first with a sample of non-academic individuals (N = 271) and the second with a sample of graduate students (N = 129). Results show that greater visibility of women researchers reduces the gender gap in self-efficacy beliefs between men and women in both populations. It also increases women researchers’ perceived expertise among non-academic participants, but not among graduate students. Among the later, however, heightened visibility is also unexpectedly associated with a decline in the perceived attractiveness of academic careers, but only for men. While our research focuses specifically on women researchers in the field of management science and manipulates media visibility through the relative representation of women and men in a simulated scientific dissemination newsletter, our findings offer broader insights into how media exposure can influence self-efficacy beliefs, perceptions of researchers’ expertise, and the attractiveness of academic careers. Building on these insights, we propose recommendations for researchers, academic institutions, and media organizations engaged in science dissemination.

Everyone seems to have something to say about creativity, thus participating in the reproduction of persistent myths about creativity that may influence creative behaviour. This research explores the influence of Laypeople's Implicit Theories of Creativity (LIToCs) regarding the drivers of creativity on creative performance, to ascertain whether having strong convictions about the drivers of creativity either enhances or hinders creative productivity when these convictions align with the actual methods of stimulating creativity. An experiment randomly involved 69 subjects who were invited to drink the exact same fruit juice before performing a creative task. In one condition, they were told this was indeed juice; in the other condition, they were told that it was mixed with Red Bull. Analyses showed an interaction effect with the subjects' LIToC, such that among subjects displaying strong LIToC, individual creative performance was lower when they perceived the conditions to stimulate creativity were activated, than otherwise. These results suggest that having strong beliefs in the effects of some creativity drivers might then trigger a complacent attitude and reduce the invested effort in generating creative ideas. This research contributes to rethinking how we use specific drivers to stimulate creativity, as strong LIToCs about those drivers may have a counterproductive effect on creative performance.

Understanding the dynamic relationships of the entities that have the most impact on an organization—or that the organization impacts the most—is at the core of stakeholder management approaches. In this article, we present an experiential exercise that provides a creative practical, low-overhead, discussion-oriented classroom activity to engage in a critical examination of the concept of stakeholders. This exercise is especially effective for the stakeholders usually invisibilized. Rather than relying on presenting stakeholder theory, this exercise uses fictional writing as a way for students to give a voice to water, a most often invisibilized stakeholder on an academic campus. The activity encourages reflection on the perception we hold toward certain stakeholders and aims to raise awareness toward the underrepresentation of some of them despite the centrality of their contribution to the organization. The exercise also enables students to grasp that there are limits when trying to speak on behalf of someone or something that structurally does not have a voice. This exercise can be used at the graduate level. Recommendations for adapting the exercise to the large classes are included.

Virtual teams are gaining increasing momentum in contemporary organizations. Although it is becoming clear that virtual teams will play a major role in shaping the future of work, we still know relatively little about their creative performance. Because of the disproportionate focus on conventional, face‐to‐face working practices, much of the literature remains centred around co‐located teams. In this review, we integrate existing research on team creativity and virtual work to identify the relevant factors, processes and contextual conditions that have been shown to influence creativity in virtual teams. We highlight the major challenges that are likely to impede team creativity and assess their relevance to contemporary virtual work practices. We conclude by presenting promising avenues for future research in this area.

Organizations today need to adapt their operations for a more sustainable future, and the transition management literature has highlighted the need for individuals who can collaborate with others to find new paths forward. Essentially, these individuals are boundary spanners with specific skills and competences to bridge diverging perspectives and facilitate knowledge dissemination and integration. Such individuals become critical change agents in organizations and essential in preparing the organization for sustainability transitions. The purpose of this study is to explore how organizations can enable and encourage individuals to take on this role and develop the skills and competences needed to become boundary spanners. Based on a case study set in a large Canadian energy corporation striving to shift towards more sustainable operations, our paper explores the emergence of boundary spanners, focusing on the effects of a design training program in supporting such roles in the organization. Our findings outline essential characteristics of boundary spanners; through illustrative career trajectories of four individuals participating in the training program, we show how the training program contributed to the emergence of boundary spanners.