Digital analytics platforms increasingly shape management education, but students may treat their outputs as decision rules rather than inputs for managerial judgment. This article presents KARI (Knowledge-to-Action Reasoning through Indicators), a single-session experiential learning exercise for late undergraduate, graduate, MBA, and executive learners. Small teams analyze the same dataset through different indicator families, compare conflicting conclusions, and explain how heuristics, cognitive biases, contextual assumptions, and tool dependence shape decision-making under uncertainty. Guided cross-team challenge and instructor-led debriefing help students distinguish context-sensitive heuristics from rigid rule application and revise their reasoning in response to contradictory evidence. The exercise requires minimal instructor preparation, no prior technical expertise, and has been implemented multiple times in graduate finance and analytics courses. Instructors can adapt KARI to strategy, operations, marketing analytics, HR analytics, and other management education settings.
Generation Z is reshaping the academic landscape through their unique demographic make-up, generational norms, and digital fluency. To effectively support this generation, management educators can equip students with tools to navigate educational, social, economic, and professional pressures. In this article, we present Crafting Your Values & Resilience Blueprint, an experiential exercise designed to strengthen the connection between Generation Z’s characteristics, values, and resilience, to increase their academic and professional success. More specifically, this exercise integrates personal values and resilience-building through structured self-reflection, peer discussions, and scenario-based application, focusing on resilience and value-driven decision-making. Designed for flexible delivery, the activity helps students identify core values, apply them to academic and professional challenges, and commit to actionable strategies for growth. Centered on Generation Z as a timely instructional context, the exercise can be tailored to support broader student populations and learning environments.
Many individuals view talking about pay as a taboo subject. Business students may lack the real-world experience needed to understand an appropriate starting salary given a candidate’s experience, responsibilities, and other compensable factors. Although resources that help students prepare for general on-the-job negotiations exist, these may fall short in effectively preparing students for the nuanced, data-driven, and context-specific salary research and evaluation process. Recent graduates may fail to recognize the importance of conducting robust preparation and evaluating salary data prior to compensation conversations. We share an in-class exercise for use with upper-division business undergraduates in compensation and benefits, career development, or other management courses where career preparation is discussed. We emphasize the importance of enhancing job search self-efficacy, offering a series of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) prompts and reflection through which students gain firsthand experience in researching and evaluating a realistic salary for a specific job role.
This experiential exercise expands the traditional negotiation framework ( Getting to Yes/Harvard Negotiation Project ) with active listening, tactical empathy, and revelatory insights, integrating the constructs of emotional intelligence, perspective-taking, and rapport-building. As such, negotiation is framed as an act of discovery: uncovering what the other party truly wants requires creating an environment in which they feel safe to reveal authentic interests. Practical techniques include listening intently, employing mirroring, labeling emotions, eliciting “That’s right” responses, and asking calibrated “what” or “how” questions. Two variations of this role-play exercise – a vendor contract negotiation and a terms of employment new hire negotiation – offer opportunities for undergraduate or graduate students to practice important negotiation and interpersonal communication skills.
Employee recruitment and selection continue to be heavily influenced by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools. For future managers and human resource professionals, learning to leverage GenAI is quickly becoming a critical skill. To provide undergraduate management students with the opportunity to explore these tools firsthand, we designed two complementary exercises. The first exercise provides students with a series of GenAI prompts to generate a job description and evaluate the output for accuracy, adherence to legal standards, and inclusiveness. In the second exercise, students rank the résumés of fictional candidates for the AI-generated job description to select a final candidate. Through the debrief questions of both exercises, students also reflect on the ethical implications of AI use during the recruitment and selection process.
This article presents the application and adaptation of the commercially available board game “Green Team Wins” for management education. We focus on the use and potential impact of the game as a tool for experiential learning, enabling students to explore management concepts such as consensus, groupthink, leadership, in-group/out-group dynamics, individual differences, and political behavior within their teams and organizations. In approximately 20 to 40 minutes of play, students secretly answer questions, receive points based on the most popular answer, and evaluate who on the team is similar, facilitating experiential learning and leading to specific outcomes and learning objectives as detailed in the article.
This article introduces an experiential learning exercise that uses mind mapping as a tool to develop oral communication skills among MBA students. Students first present their thought process through a collaborative mind map (“how” of a presentation) as a group before moving on to a content-rich formal presentation (“what” of a presentation). Both iterations are video recorded, and students rework their mind maps after the first feedback. The exercise integrates individual communication practice with teamwork, delegation, and reflection. Framed within Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle and cognitive load theory, the activity highlights the innovative use of mind maps for iterative oral communication improvement. The exercise is useful in a business communication course both at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels.
Forming teams, developing relationships, and building trust can be challenging when dealing with increasingly socially anxious, disconnected, and diverse student cohorts. We describe an icebreaker that, through low-risk classroom interactions, allows students to socially identify with an in-group and compete with out-groups in a classroom environment. The activities provide abundant opportunities to relate in-class experiences to Social Identity Theory and other relevant management and OB theories.
Design thinking has become a widely used methodology for innovation in business and other applications and is increasingly being taught in various educational settings. Successful implementation of design thinking depends on developing empathy for users, which refers to the ability to understand how users experience a problem from their perspective. A primary method for developing empathy with users is through in-depth interviews with them. However, in a classroom setting, it is often difficult for students to develop skill in this domain because they are not able to engage in empathy interviews in realistic settings or are reluctant to do so. In this experiential exercise, undergraduate students in a required management major course use generative AI, specifically ChatGPT, to conduct empathy interviews with simulated AI-generated users as part of a series of connected assignments that span all phases of the design thinking process.
This article describes a semester-long team project designed to teach undergraduate students about the role of job analysis in human resources (HR) by engaging them with popular culture in the form of fictional jobs depicted in film. The project spans several stages, including job analysis, recruitment, selection, performance appraisal, compensation, and benefits, with each stage highlighting the importance of the initial job analysis. Throughout the semester, students receive written feedback on draft deliverables and make revisions based on that feedback, which promotes targeted active learning and self-improvement over time. Thus, the project provides students with job analysis skills using fictional jobs, preparing them for rapidly changing job landscapes, while also emphasizing the downstream impact of job analysis on various HR functions.
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.
In this article, I introduce a classroom activity that leverages AI to help students frame certain types of workplace conflict in terms of cultural differences, rather than individual flaws. This enables students to develop skills to identify and manage workplace conflict in a way that recognizes and respects employees’ cultural backgrounds and values. I combine Erin Meyer’s Culture Map, which delineates eight dimensions upon which cultures vary in their interpersonal interactions at work, with AI’s generative ability. I ask students to use AI to write a 3-minute script of a conversation that illustrates a workplace conflict based on one of the Culture Map dimensions. Students edit the script for accuracy to deepen their understanding of cultural differences. They then act out the scripts, vote, and receive awards for Best Actor and Best Script. Through this exercise, students illustrate how workplace conflict can be rooted in cultural, rather than interpersonal, differences.
This experiential exercise immerses students in allocating limited resources across work, health, finances, and relationships while encountering fixed costs and unpredictable events. The version presented here reflects how the activity is most commonly implemented in undergraduate and early graduate management courses. The Burnout Budget illustrates how unfair starting points, depletion, and constrained choices can fuel stress and burnout. The activity draws on Conservation of Resources (COR) theory and experiential learning, and fits within a 40- to 60-min session, adapting easily to undergraduate, graduate, and executive contexts. Students connect firsthand experience to theory by examining tradeoffs, inequality, and recovery. The instructions, materials, and debrief guidance help instructors foster engagement and reflection on resilience and values in management education.
Recruitment is one of the most critical Human Resource Management (HRM) functions in organizations and a central topic in most HRM courses. This paper describes a simulation exercise about a high-tech company aiming to establish a solid staff foundation to expand its business landscape. In this exercise, students take on the role of decision-makers in a recruitment team for the company and are tasked with collaboratively identifying the company’s staffing needs, deciding on a recruitment strategy, prioritizing positions, and making key recruitment decisions under simulated constraints. A plenary discussion follows, where teams compare their decisions and explain the reasoning behind the choices they made. A debriefing discussion led by the instructor using the reflection questions concludes the activity. This exercise can be conducted in both in-person and virtual class settings.
Undergraduate management students often perceive effective teamwork and leadership as unattainable goals, doubting their own potential and that of their classmates. This article introduces a gamified escape room exercise designed to challenge these assumptions. Unlike traditional escape rooms, this exercise uses clues to define concepts while the gameplay requires their immediate application, immersing students in the process model of communication, team roles (task, building, and individualistic), and leadership behaviors (task-oriented and relationship-oriented). Students develop practical awareness of their role as teammates and leaders by reflecting on their gameplay. This escape room holds three unique qualities in that each clue aids students in defining theoretical concepts, the experience offers a real-time application of the same theoretical concepts, and in-depth debriefing allows a class to analyze the concepts with a common, shared experience. Instructors can use this article’s materials to run the escape room as-is or as examples for creating their own.
This article presents a debate-based experiential exercise in which students adopt stakeholder roles (investors, executives, the public, and regulators) to analyze financial reporting frequency through agency and stakeholder lenses. The activity surfaces a paradox—short-term accountability via quarterly reporting versus long-term value—and uses a structured debrief aligned with Kolb’s model of experiential learning. After the exercise, students can apply agency and stakeholder theories to a concrete governance decision, analyze trade-offs from multiple stakeholder positions, and articulate policy and managerial implications. Materials include role briefs, student instructions, a theory primer, example student preparation materials, instructor notes and debrief prompts. An online variant is provided. The approach advances debate pedagogy by integrating an accounting regulation topic with a paradox scaffold and a theory-mapping debrief script, enabling transferable insight across the curriculum.
This article discusses the virtues of using the Hidden Brain podcast in organizational behavior (OB) courses. The information in this podcast helps listeners better understand their thoughts and behaviors, making it a valuable resource on OB topics. To facilitate student learning and engagement, this article highlights two ways instructors can leverage this podcast. First, instructors can integrate information from podcast episodes to expose students to topic-relevant research not typically discussed in OB textbooks and help students better understand how OB concepts are expressed in real-world settings. Second, instructors can use information from podcast episodes to acquire new knowledge about OB concepts covered in the textbook. This new knowledge can subsequently be used to design more engaging lectures, discussions, and activities.
This experiential exercise immerses students in the practical application of two distinct theories: the Thomas–Kilmann Conflict Mode Theory and the Communication Accommodation Theory. Students analyze how individuals approach and address conflict through collaborative theory review, application, role-play, and guided reflection. Designed for undergraduate and graduate management, leadership, or organizational behavior courses, the exercise offers a flexible and interactive format adaptable for both in-person and online instruction. It can be completed in a 90-minute class session and includes options for customization. By the end of the session, students develop a richer understanding of conflict dynamics, leadership styles, and cross-cultural communication, gaining insight into how personal behavior, context, and communication choices influence conflict outcomes. The exercise supports active learning and critical thinking while developing practical skills essential for navigating team interactions and resolving interpersonal conflicts in professional settings.
Networking is an essential part of a successful business career. While it seems easy on paper, there are several barriers that prevent people from actively engaging in networking, one of the most prominent barrier being lack of conversational skills. This exercise with its bingo-like mechanics promotes small talk and casual pursuit of predetermined networking goals. Building upon “small-world phenomenon” and “strength of weak ties” theory, the exercise creates an environment where it is possible to understand dynamics and benefits of networking rapidly while giving a chance for participants to find their own style. The activity is suitable for undergraduate students in business and management–related programs.
