Chantal van Esch

Engaging in reflexive practice is crucial for both management students and professionals. Teaching the core skills of reflexivity can be difficult, however. We describe the Still Life Photo Exercise, a simple yet powerful reflexive activity grounded in art-based pedagogy. In this unconventional method for stimulating deep reflection and engaged discussion, students choose and arrange everyday objects into a work of art in line with a given theme, learning to critically reflect upon their lived experiences through creative skills, projective techniques, illustration of essence, and the physical act of making. The exercise’s versatility, its ability to draw out deep personal reflection through art and its power to help students share and build social connections make it suitable for any management context. This article provides instructions for delivery in an online asynchronous undergraduate course in Leadership and details how it can be used in Organizational Behavior, Entrepreneurship, and (small or large) face-to-face instruction.

This chapter provides an overview of select theories from the organizational and management sciences that inform women in leadership research. These theories are categorized by level - individual (micro) level, interpersonal (meso) level, and organizational (macro) - to look at the various leadership research focused on women that has been conducted at each level of analysis. Further, potential research questions that may advance extant understanding of women and leadership from the perspective of each theory are provided. The authors encourage future researchers working on women in leadership topics to continue to draw extensively on the organizational and management science theories discussed in this chapter. The multilevel approach offered by these theories can help address barriers to and opportunities for women and leadership at all levels in efforts to advance knowledge and practice leading to lasting change.

Once assumed the sole province of musicians and artists, creativity classes abound in business schools as a critical component of entrepreneurship curricula. The exercises explained in this article, designed for a creativity or entrepreneurship class, but equally applicable for strategic management or even engineering classes, address the ubiquitous question of how to recognize and stimulate potentially lucrative ideas. Two exercises are sequentially paired to help students first identify business opportunities and then imaginatively craft potentially feasible business ideas. The Zeitgeist Exercise allows students to brainstorm business trends and radical innovations using PESTEL, then list or draw their observations on an expansive whiteboard, thereby capturing the intellectual climate of our times. The tactile nature of Play-Doh ™ Exercise encourages students to playfully explore solutions to opportunities identified in the first exercise. Students may mold trademarks or artifacts that symbolize their innovation or the innovation itself.

The sitcom The Good Place can be used by management instructors to teach ethical frameworks and concepts. This series, familiar to many undergraduate students in the US, features a Professor of Ethics and Moral Philosophy who gives mini lectures applied to what the characters are experiencing. These mini lectures can be shown to undergraduates studying ethics in a full course or as a subsection of courses such as management, organizational behavior, or leadership. This article provides information on particular clips that management instructors can use, recommendations for discussion topics with prompts provided, and a comparative pedagogical analysis of using this resource.

Purpose: This study examined the effects of gender and pandemic concerns on mentorship seeking behavior during the pandemic caused by the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and its relationship to self-efficacy. Design/methodology/approach: This study analyzes the data collected from 253 academics in a quantitative survey administered online. Findings: Women and those with higher levels of concern about the COVID-19 pandemic were more likely to seek mentorship. During this time of uncertainty role modeling was sought more than career support and psychosocial support. All three functions of mentorship seeking were positively associated with higher levels of self-efficacy. Research limitations/implications: The present study finds that individuals turn to mentors when they are concerned about macro-level events (e.g. a global pandemic). Additionally, individuals who self-identify as women sought mentorship to a greater extent than men. In this way, it is not only the situation that matters (like women having fewer resources and more demands than men) but also the perception of a situation (like how concerned individuals were about the COVID-19 pandemic). Additionally, this paper helps to further develop the understanding of the mentorship function of role modeling. Practical implications: Organizations and mentors ought to be cognizant of role modeling during times of crisis, especially for women, this may be counterintuitive to the inclination to provide career and psychosocial support for mentees. Originality/value: This study examines the gendered implications for mentoring during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study specifically examines mentorship seeking behavior and its influence on self-efficacy during uncertain times.

This article focuses on using the cooperative board game Pandemic® to teach management. In Pandemic, players must work together to cure four diseases and save the world. In this article, we suggest how it can be used in the classroom to teach decision making and also give guidance on how the game can help students learn how to reflect and put into practice the leadership, teamwork, goal setting, and ethical theories presented during management, leadership, and organizational behavior courses. Pandemic is a useful experiential teaching tool that engages students in complex decisions.

This study investigates the role of perceived riskiness in senior leadership selection decisions. Perceived riskiness is defined as the degree of uncertainty and the significance of the outcomes from the selection decision. Hypotheses that perceived riskiness is a mediator between a candidate's qualifications and selection as well as salary offer, and that gender moderates those relationships, were examined through structural equation modeling and logistic regression. A sample of 253 individuals with prior experience in hiring and promotion decisions responded to an online survey where they read a job description and candidate profile summary of one of the following: a highly qualified female, a highly qualified male, a moderately qualified female, or a moderately qualified male. The results demonstrated a complementary mediating effect of perceived riskiness between a candidate's qualifications and their selection, and between a candidate's qualifications and their salary offer. In addition, gender moderates the pathway from qualifications to perceived riskiness in that highly qualified women were perceived as less risky for senior leadership than highly qualified men, while moderately qualified women were seen as riskier for senior leadership than moderately qualified men. We offer recommendations for human resource professionals and hiring managers to recognize and mitigate the perceived riskiness of women in the selection process for senior leadership roles.

In this essay, we call on management educators to better equip current and future managers and leaders to understand the experiences of transgender employees and address their unique needs in the workplace. We first discuss insights about the transgender experience based on concepts from gender/transgender scholarship, and provide a current transgender lexicon. Next, we discuss the issues and experiences faced daily by transgender people in organizations and society. Finally, we discuss extant effective workplace practices regarding transgender inclusion to bring attention to what needs to be implemented in organizations. Through this essay, we encourage management educators to address transgender experiences in their classrooms so that current and future managers and leaders are able to address the needs of a gender diverse workforce.