Managers are essential in the strategy-making process and often use the launch of new products to aide in the advancement of their selected organizations. This article links current management curriculum with the role of the product manager, introduces students to the concepts of strategy and product management, and encourages students to think…

Six classroom interventions designed to continuously teach and acclimate our management students about their eventual realistic reward/punishment contingencies and managerial performance expectations can be established using the classroom's grading system and the class syllabus. Interventions include (1) using points rather than grades for student…

The Arena activity is an in-class, experiential learning exercise that requires student teams to navigate and assist a blindfolded team member through a maze-like setting. The goal of the activity is to seek and find all of the team's assigned objects. However, only the blindfolded team member can collect these objects in The Arena. This activity…

Employee empowerment yields positive outcomes for employees, managers, and organizations. Yet, too many employees feel disempowered at work, and managers, while wanting to empower employees, often do not know how. Contributing to this state of affairs is the lack of published, high-fidelity exercises explicitly designed to instruct students on how…

Personnel selection is a key topic in Human Resource Management (HRM) courses. Many selection exercises focus on management situations that are unfamiliar to students who are taking introductory HRM courses. In contrast, this exercise introduces students to the pre-interview steps in the personnel selection process by asking them to determine the…

Research suggests that students today favor a collaborative learning style, short cases, and group activities over semester-long case studies, and they respond well to classroom activities characterized by the use of technology, entertainment, and excitement. Accordingly, this article presents an exercise designed using these types of activities…

Training programs enhance the skills of participants. Role-play, one method used for such skill development, is learning through performing a set of behaviors, in accordance with predetermined expectations of a job role in an organizational context. Some learners find role-play daunting, even traumatic. To counter this experience, this article…

As the ubiquity of virtual work--and particularly virtual project teams--increases in the professional environment, management and other professional programs are increasingly teaching students skills related to virtual work. One of the most common forms of teaching virtual work skills is a virtual team project, in which students collaborate with…

This article presents the experiential, cross-curricular Gleam Lighting case exercise, which helps graduate students develop the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) needed to effectively work in a cross-functional team. In the exercise, students from two separate graduate accounting and human resource courses work together as a…