Studies have revealed the challenges facing management and the role the manager has with respect to facilitating team development. This exercise builds upon the knowledge a management student gains via textbook and/or classroom lecture concerning the stages of team development and offers real-world examples of the challenges facing managers when…

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…

Inclusivity and diversity are critical to maximizing team performance. This activity incorporates a popular party game that connects students with the learning objectives, demonstrating the vital roles inclusion and diversity play in the success of a business and the importance of building skills for maximizing teamwork. With little instruction to…

This orientation session was designed to prepare students for their final MBA Capstone project, leverage lessons learned from graduates, transfer prior learning about teams and project management, and launch consulting projects with actual clients. Companies have used orientation sessions to onboard new employees for many years to improve…

This article outlines a unique student activity designed to close the gap between students' perceived and actual communication and team behavior during virtual group meetings. The Communication Audit exercise requires that students record an online small group meeting and then review the recording while categorizing each verbal remark into…

This multiphase classroom exercise is designed for undergraduate students in capstone strategic management courses to become comfortable and adept at using Porter's Five Forces framework for industry analysis. Assuming students have a base level of familiarity with the framework, this exercise enables them to apply it to an industry and a company…

This article explains an activity that can be conducted to form teams in university business classes. It allows students to actively participate in the team selection process and learn valuable human resource management skills. Students are placed in the role of hiring managers. They have to identify the skills and characteristics needed to…

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…

Effective class discussions are often frustrated by dual challenges: lack of participation and poor quality of contribution. To address both challenges, we describe an experiential exercise for managing classroom discussion that is based on an adaptation of a classic creativity model. It motivates student participation by generating structured…

Completing a jigsaw puzzle can be a fun activity, but it can also be a learning experience. Here an exercise is presented that involves student teams completing a simple puzzle while at least one of the members is blindfolded. The blindfolded member is the only member allowed to touch the puzzle pieces, and the other team members have to…

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…

The interest in aligning college graduates' skills, competencies, and experiences with what employers desire continues across academia. Employers seek higher levels of resilience than they see in most new employees. This article provides a review of the employee resilience literature and describes a team member change scenario focused on enhancing…

The Widget design task is an in-class, experiential exercise that affords students the opportunity to develop interpersonal skills in group negotiation. Students engage in new product design in committees of two dyads where one dyad represents Consumer Research and the other represents Strategic Management. Task information creates different…