Business Leadership Education: A Virtual Storytellers Exercise

ABSTRACTOnline courses are becoming popular in business education and require creative strategies to maintain students ' engagement and facilitate contextual and complex understanding of class concepts and theories. In this paper, we are proposing an exercise for online undergraduate Organizational Behavior courses to motivate students and enhance their understanding of class concepts through the use of storytelling. In this exercise, students work in teams to narrate stories that describe with rich detail different concepts and theories pertaining to team management in general and virtual team management in particular. The results suggest that students develop a higher level of critical thinking in virtual team management by storytelling and develop strong relations with other members of their virtual teams.Key concepts: storytelling, online education, organizational behavior, virtual teams.INTRODUCTIONThe demand for online courses is experiencing an impressive growth in business education (Alavi & Leidner, 2001). Questions have been raised regarding the effectiveness of online courses in comparison with the delivery of these same courses in the classroom. Online students report lower levels of overall satisfaction with online courses and with the mode of instruction used in online courses. They rate their professors lower than in classroom settings, and express lower levels of interest in the subject matter when delivered online (Kartha, 2006).In this paper, a semester-long exercise, called the Storytellers Exercise is introduced in an Organizational Behavior (OB) course. Its purpose is to improve complex and contextual understanding of OB concepts and theories, enhancing recollection of class materials, and motivating and engaging students through a creative and fun activity. The Storytellers Exercise was designed to generate highly interactive virtual team experiences for students in online OB courses and to foster learning through active and systematic reflection on OB concepts and their own experiences using storytelling.This paper is structured in three parts. In the first part, we review recent literature to discuss the potential of storytelling as a teaching tool. Then, we describe the Storytellers Exercise and its key elements. Finally, we share some results of the exercise and their implications for student virtual team learning and engagement.STORYTELLINGStorytelling is a powerful communication tool. In organizations, leaders use stories to convey their passion for their vision and inspire their followers (Guber, 2007). Stories help the transformational leader align their followers' understanding of the complexities and dangers in the status quo and convey the importance of their vision to advance that state of the organization for the better (Conger, 1999). In TED Talks, for example, the power of storytelling is demonstrated in the worldwide popularity of their presentations, which captivate a worldwide audience in the discussion of concepts that are often technical and complex through the narration of stories. In addition to being a communication tool, storytelling can also be used, by integrating stories, to make sense of events and construct experiences (Gephart, 1991; Morgan & Dennehy, 2004), helping individuals manage their tacit knowledge and make it explicit (Ambrosini & Bowman, 2001). Shamir and Eilam (2005), for instance, explain the value of stories in the development of the authentic leader, who uses the narration of a personal story in making sense of who they are. Authentic leaders evaluate the importance of their different values and how those drive their behaviors throughout their lives by exploring and telling their personal story.In education, storytelling is frequently used to attract students' interest to the theories and concepts discussed in class, often as a hook for the introduction of new class material. Using stories facilitates students' recollection of class concepts and enhances students' understanding of the complexity of these materials (Down & King, 1999; Harbin & Humphrey, 2010). …