Abstract
Managers are expected to be able to manage change. The current pace of change, driven in part by high market volatility and almost constant innovation, makes the development of managers’ change management skills even more important. To assist instructors who teach courses or single lessons on organizational change, we have assembled a collection of new resources for teaching organizational change for this issue of Management Teaching Review. It includes four short experiential exercises designed to make change management concepts meaningful to students; two articles designed to give students opportunities to lead organizational change: one through a real-world semester-long project and one through a computer simulation; and a proposal for curricular change in business schools to better address current economic, social, and environmental sustainability challenges.
“Simulating Operational Complexities: A Hands-On Experiential Exercise With Laundry” by Noel Criscione-Naylor immerses students in an experience of the “white-water rapids” metaphor of change. Students respond to constant changes in customer demands while simulating laundry facility operations, an experience that can be debriefed in terms of leadership, group process, operations, and change management concepts. The exercise was designed for undergraduate operations management and facilities management courses.
The next two exercises focus on specific change management concepts. First, “Developing Change Readiness: A Video-Based Classroom Exercise” by Virajanand Varma addresses change recipients’ readiness beliefs. Students watch a training video and identify the concerns that arose when a top-down change was mandated. The exercise is suitable for undergraduate and graduate courses on management, leadership, and organizational behavior, as well as corporate training modules.
Second, Todd Bridgman’s exercise, “Overcoming Compliance to Change: Dynamics of Power, Obedience, and Resistance in a Classroom Restructure,” challenges the commonly held view that resistance is an undesirable response to planned change and needs to be overcome. This simple exercise, which involves repeatedly asking students to change their seats, is suitable for any course that addresses change management and leadership.
The next article, by Špela Trefalt, “Leading Organizational Change: Semester-Long Project,” presents a framework for an independent, student-led endeavor for courses on leading organizational change. MBA students plan and implement a change project of their own design and receive developmental feedback on their change management skills, such as influencing others, selling their ideas, and overcoming resistance.
One skill in the change facilitator’s toolkit is the ability to frame questions about organizational issues. David Bright’s exercise, “ProHealth or HealthCore: Teaching Students About Reality Creation in Organizational Life,” reveals how different types of questions influence perceptions of and narratives about organizational reality, which in turn shape inspirations for organizational change. The exercise is suitable for both graduate and undergraduate courses on organizational development and change management.
In their Resource Review, “Experiencing Organizational Change Through the Change Management Simulation: Power and Influence,” Kathi J. Lovelace and Loren R. Dyck describe a popular web-based simulation in which students learn about leading strategic change while implementing an organization-wide environmental sustainability initiative within a manufacturing firm. The authors offer suggestions for using the simulation in both graduate and undergraduate courses and analyze its strengths and limitations.
The final article, “Advancing STEM-Based Business Sustainability: Mending the Curricular Gap,” from the Research-to-Practice Insights section, also addresses organizational change for sustainability but in the context of a business school curriculum. Business curricula for sustainability tend to focus on issues of social sustainability, such as green marketing, green-washing, greening the supply chain, or accounting and financial reporting issues. In contrast, in this article, authors Elizabeth Petrun Sayers, Christopher A. Craig, Susan J. Gilbertz, Song Feng, Rita Karam, and Angelena Bohman propose integrating cross-disciplinary science, technology, engineering, and math competencies into the curriculum to develop business students’ sustainability literacy.
To conclude, by grouping these articles in a single issue, we make some of our most current and useful change management teaching resources available in one spot. We hope this issue will stimulate you, our readers, to share even more of what you already do successfully in teaching change leadership. Together, we can marshal even more useful resources and help management students learn to manage organizational change more effectively.