Abstract
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 student resilience for use by faculty in course design. Business school students participating in a 10-week, team-based business simulation experience a team member change midway through the simulation. Student response and descriptions of learning outcomes from the member change experience are discussed.
Keywords
Millennials—those born between 1980 and 2000—are becoming the predominant force in the workplace. They are expected to comprise 50% of the workforce by 2020 and 75% of the global workforce by 2025 (Barnes & Noble College, 2014). Ninety-one percent of Millennials expect to stay in a job for less than 3 years, according to the Future Workplace Multiple Generations @ Work survey of 1,189 employees and 150 managers (Future Workplace, 2012). That means they will have 15 to 20 jobs over the course of their working lives (Future Workplace, 2012). According to a recent CNN Money article, on average, Millennials will change jobs four times by the age of 32. This compares with an average of two job changes by age 32 for Generation X (Long, 2016). As such, we believe that it is exceedingly important to provide students with the skills necessary to thrive under conditions of workforce change.
A recent study found the greatest gap between what candidates bring to their work and what hiring managers expect to find at the entry level is adaptability (Career Advisory Board, 2015). Recent academic studies discuss employers’ expectations that future graduates will need to have increased adaptability and flexibility toward how they approach their work tasks (Tymon & Mackay, 2015). Adaptability is often termed resilience in the literature; it is viewed as an important resource used by individuals to manage the ever-changing situations experienced in life (Shin, Taylor, & Seo, 2012) and is considered one of the key indicators in identifying leadership potential at early stages of one’s career (Dries & Pepermans, 2012). Resilience is “a dynamic process by which an individual’s characteristics, abilities, and competencies combine to enable the individual to adapt, recover, and grow in response to challenging and/or threatening conditions” (Estrada, Severt, & Jimènez-Rodriguez, 2016, p. 498). The ability to adapt is adjusting to challenging and/or threatening conditions (Estrada et al., 2016). Recovery is an individual’s capacity to overcome challenging and/or threatening conditions (Estrada et al., 2016). Growth occurs when individuals develop and evolve from challenging and/or threatening conditions (Estrada et al., 2016).
Workplace changes that generate challenging and/or threatening situations have become a constant in organizations (Shin et al., 2012). Fifty percent of change efforts are unsuccessful, and employees are known to play a key role in the change-related outcomes (Shin et al., 2012). Resilience skills will be needed to mitigate the long, emotionally intense, stressful, and tiring characteristics that are often associated with change (Dries & Pepermans, 2012). Adaptability often demonstrates a willingness to learn from experience, further increasing employees’ ability to succeed in their current and future work assignments (Dries & Pepermans, 2012).
Summers, Humphrey, and Harris (2012) studied flux in coordination. “Flux describes the time after a change occurs and before a team has restructured and is performing” (p. 315); coordination is “the process of orchestrating the sequence and timing of independent actions” (p. 315). So flux in coordination is “a team’s ability to convert inputs to outcomes via variation in coordination mechanisms” (p. 317). It is understood that flux in coordination is a key element regarding how change in an organization affects individuals and teams (Summers et al., 2012). As flux in coordination increases, resulting from team change, students’ ability and skill in handling these events in the future should also increase. In their 2012 study, Shin et al. found that employees with high resilience tended to have a strong commitment to change. The commitment to change coupled with flux coordination strength should yield higher benefit outcomes as organizations pursue improvements.
Research found that there is significant connection between emotions and resilience (Kay, 2016; Meredith et al., 2011; Troy & Mauss, 2011), such that if emotions are understood and managed, resilience increases. Strategies for understanding and managing emotions can be the development of emotional acumen, as well as experiencing change and practicing emotional management. An experiential exercise in emotional management and resilience building is to consider a work situation in which an employee feels stuck and then think about factors that the employee could change to improve the situation (Britt, Shen, Sinclair, Grossman, & Klieger, 2016). The stuck factors under consideration are often emotions that can be recognized and dealt with.
Team resilience is defined as “a shared belief held by the team that it can respond to disruptive and challenging events, recover from setbacks, and thrive as a team under these conditions” (Kennedy, Landon, & Maynard, 2016, p. 468). Team-level resilience research has suggested that a group of resilient individuals may not work well as a resilient team; however, teams can “impact the resilience and adaptation of individual members” (Kennedy et al., 2016, p. 467). An example of a team driving individual resilience growth occurs when a team member adjusts his workload to sustain team contribution (Kennedy et al., 2016). Enhancing resilience can be addressed through both individual and team efforts.
The Role of Uncertainty in Team Experiences
Implementing experiential learning throughout the management and business school curriculum has moved from a novel idea to an accepted and important pedagogical practice in our field (Gallos, 2008; Kolb & Kolb, 2005; McCarthy & McCarthy, 2006). Expanding this methodology beyond difficult-to-understand theory and concepts, we employ unique experiential learning pedagogy to support resilience competency development. To enhance resilience development, a member change method that demonstrates uncertainty and change involving a teammate leaving a team, and joining another, was designed. This method supports students’ development of resilience skills including the ability to adapt, recover, and grow. It is highly probable that students’ adaptability skill development through classroom activities will have positive effects on their career adaptability. Career adaptability has positive effects on future employees’ ability to transition from and to new career options (Bimrose & Hearne, 2012).
Example of Team Change in an Experiential Exercise
The authors, both of whom teach in a large northeastern US business school, use a 10-week business simulation in our capstone strategic management course for senior business students. The strategy simulation is available from a leading business simulation provider and includes 10 decision rounds, measured in years, with over 50 variables. Groups of four to five students are put in the role of the management team in an automobile company competing directly against other teams in the class. Teams need to develop and implement a profitable long-term business strategy, identify market opportunities, develop products and services to satisfy them, and learn to allocate scarce resources among various investment alternatives. Historically, teams have stayed intact from the beginning of the simulation until its conclusion. The simulation is a strong candidate for team member change exercises because its complexity does not allow any team to obtain complete knowledge of the industry or functions of the simulation. Therefore, different members coming in and out of a group allow for the potential of new discoveries while transforming the decision-making processes of the extant team.
We had 24 teams participating in the simulation over the course of one semester. Halfway through the simulation, 18 of the teams had one student from each team selected at random to move to a different team. The six teams that did not experience change constituted a control group. Prior to the team change announcement, students were told of the multiple job changes that would likely occur early in their career whether by choice or by employer decision. Team changes were announced, and reconstituted teams were immediately required to begin working together on the next decision round.
Bardoel, Pettit, De Cieri, and McMillan (2014) suggest that in organizational restructuring, changes be made to the reward systems to motivate and accommodate employee interests. To mitigate unnecessary concerns about course grade impact due to team member change, a hybrid grading scheme was invoked for members who changed teams. There are two grade measures at the end of the simulation that could be affected by changing teams: quantitative team performance and team participation. For the members who changed teams, team performance and participation were measured just prior to moving teams and at the end of the simulation. The results for those who changed teams were averaged to determine the course grade in the two measures. Like managers in the workplace, we continued to ensure that teams were working to meet simulation objectives. Students responded that this was a fair and equitable approach, and early anxiety was replaced with acceptance because the instructors clearly communicated with students about the grading impacts.
Although experimental research on team change exists, such as Summers et al. (2012) where teams were manipulated in laboratory settings, such research is designed to understand the impact of change on certain outcomes. In contrast, the team change being reported on here is a part of pedagogy—teaching students how to operate under conditions of change—rather than a part of group dynamic research. Class teams are formed over longer periods of time, and they are expected to interact a great deal outside of the classroom. Teams form specific routines and roles on their own, as opposed to being assigned specific identities by researchers. We did not expect that the results would differ significantly, but we expected that the students’ takeaways would be much different. We believed that the students’ skill building around adaptability would be greatly enhanced through such changes in their school assignments as the flux in coordination would be affected more significantly.
Key Learnings and Outcomes
The primary learning from the team member change exercise was the importance of recognizing change impact on established processes and relationships. The students who switched teams and those who received new members realized that it was important to quickly process the change that had occurred while also building a productive relationship with the new member. Processing the change meant discussing what it felt like to change teams, to lose and gain a team member, and what the changes meant to team dynamics. Teams that openly discussed the change among all team members overcame different backgrounds and experiences faster than teams that did not process the change. Based on a shared knowledge of the change that occurred, integrating the new members, leveraging their expertise, and identifying required expertise gaps was deemed valuable to achieving the best simulation outcomes.
Resilience skills including adapting to change and comfort with change processes in teams were strongly enhanced through participation in this exercise. Students reported that the team member change experience would be valuable in future job interviews. The students said they would use (or already had used) the member change experience in response to the oft-asked interview questions, “Tell me about a time you were in a challenging situation and what you did” or “Tell me about your experience working on teams.” The few students who would not use member change in interviews explained that they had work experience that was more valuable to discuss than the academic-based simulation, yet they explicitly recognized their resilience skill enhancement.
A number of students reported difficulties with changing groups. One student stated, “I was told [by my new team members] that I was not to change anything, or else. This did not sit right with me.” She went on to discuss her desire to be a part of the team and to learn as much as she could from the exercise. On consultation with the instructor about best practices in difficult situations, the student was able to deescalate the conflict, while also building better team communication through a team meeting where she was able to explain her thoughts and concerns with all of the teammates present. Instead of escalation of a one-on-one rivalry, the student was able to communicate with the whole team in terms of performance and participation. At the end of the simulation, all four team participants said the team change strongly enhanced team performance through increasing team engagement and communication. A team member stated, “After [the new teammate] joined our team, we felt empowered to contribute and speak up. This change brought a period of discomfort and conflict, but it was a positive process.”
When the announcement was first made, many of the students in the class were upset that they were required to change teams, and there were moments of student pushback. For example, one team member stated, “We don’t want her on our team!” Another student that was changing teams wondered, “Why do I have to change? Everything was going so well. This is going to be a lot more work!”
One team stated, “We had no problem with the team change. We each had assigned roles on our team. It was easy to integrate a new member, because they had a very clear piece of the assignment to handle.” Numerous teams that were able to outperform after the change cited their ability to integrate the new perspective immediately into their team decision-making processes. When teams had well-defined roles, they were able to keep moving forward much as they had operated before the change. In team situations where students were performing poorly, the new teammate often influenced the team with a new perspective or a missing piece of information. They credited their change in performance with “listening.” Other teams that did not perform as well after the change cited reasons such as “we were never able to find a new meeting time” or “we just did it without [name] because he wasn’t that interested.” Ultimately, teams that found a way to immediately engage with new members and apply the new knowledge that they were bringing outperformed those teams that struggled to assimilate the new member or rejected the new member’s point of view.
Students suggested that team member change continue in subsequent semesters, citing the overwhelming value of the experience to better prepare them for challenges they would likely face on the job. They spoke of the value of experiencing a real-life situation in a safe environment and the ability to fall back on a successful transition should a similar change occur in the workplace. Students perceived that their ability to adapt to new team situations and think through how to proceed to meet team requirements was enhanced by the team member change experience.
These recommendations were especially interesting in the context of discussions with students in teams that did not experience change. Without the element of change, team routines in the simulation were reported to be mostly on “autopilot” after Year 4 or 5.
As simulation facilitators and course instructors, we noted several important items as well. While agreeing with the students that team change altered the “autopilot” nature that began to develop throughout the simulation, we also noted that it increased the students’ ability to communicate with each other about the content of the simulation. Furthermore, in more competitive environments, poorly performing teams were more likely to improve their performance when team change occurred as opposed to teams without change. Generally, top-performing teams continued to perform well, with or without team member change.
Conclusion and Future Opportunities
Leadership and change expert John Kotter (2011) states, Anyone in the business world—even casual observers of it—knows that it’s currently experiencing a rapid rate of change. New companies spring up seemingly overnight. Products and services that were revolutionary two years ago are rendered obsolete if they don’t adapt to market changes fast enough. (p. 1)
Furthermore, the rate of change in the world today is going up. It’s going up fast, and it’s affecting organizations in a huge way. The evidence of this can be seen almost everywhere—life-cycle of products, number of patents filed in the US Patent Office, amount of cell phone activity across national boundaries—on and on and on. (Kotter, 2011, p. 1)
Based on the rate of change occurring in organizations and the significant positive student response and stated learning outcomes, we believe there is substantial value incorporating team member change in future classes.
Students have repeatedly noted that it would make sense to move two students from each team. It would more significantly change team norms when 40% to 50% of team members change. On completion of the experience, most students felt that the team member change better prepared them for workplace success. A research study focused on recent graduates who participated in exercises with team member change would allow us to empirically test the impact of such exercises on workforce preparedness and success. Furthermore, the opportunity to empirically test learning outcomes related to adaptive capability, change readiness, and critical thinking in the context of team change also exists. While the team member changes in the reported cases were made randomly, future research could test the impacts of other member change selection methodologies to enhance or expand learning outcomes.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.