1241367
editorial2024
MTRXXX10.1177/23792981241241367Management Teaching ReviewCrowne and Schmidt
Editor’s Corner
Helping Our Students to
Develop Into the Leaders
Our World Needs
Management Teaching Review
2024, Vol. 9(2) 104­–105
© The Author(s) 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1177/23792981241241367
DOI: 10.1177/23792981241241367
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Kerri A. Crowne1 and Gordon B. Schmidt2
The study of leadership has become increasingly important and many business schools
believe they play an important role in developing our future leaders (Leroy et al.,
2022). Business schools do this in a number of ways, whether it be full courses devoted
to leadership, units in courses such as introductory management or organizational
behavior, team projects, or in extracurricular activities. Management Teaching Review
has published a number of exercises and articles related to leadership across a range of
aspects of the topic, including defining what a leader is (Polin, 2019), preparing to be
a leader (Tyran, 2017), how leaders differ (Stratton et al., 2022), and bread and butter
concepts like transformational leadership (Capitano et al., 2022).
While leadership is an area Management Teaching Review has covered significantly already, its importance to management education and our world is such that
finding new impactful and effective leadership exercises and resources for our classroom is still vital. This issue provides instructors with a variety of articles that are
excellent resources for expanding our student’s knowledge of leadership and develops
their leadership skills.
In the first article “Leadership in the Eye of the Beholder,” Maria Alejandra Quijada,
Tim O. Peterson, and Claudette Peterson use artistic images to inspire discussion and
generate a broader understanding of leadership in students. Students are asked to look
at an image and discuss how it relates to leadership. This discussion leads into the
students becoming aware of their perceptions of leadership and also provides opportunities for the students to see conflicting perceptions. The experiential exercise can be
used both in-person and online.
The second article in this issue “Situational Leadership Role-Play and Debrief: An
Exploration of Useful Components and Limitations” by John D Egan focuses on a
leadership model often taught in management education. Using a role-play activity,
Egan expands students’ knowledge of situational leadership by providing them the
1
Widener University, Chester, PA, USA
University of Louisiana Monroe, USA
2
Corresponding Author:
Kerri A. Crowne, Widener University, One University Place, Chester, PA 19013, USA.
Email: kabrannen@widener.edu
Crowne and Schmidt
105
opportunity to be a team member or leader. With the prompts provided, students have
a chance to work through the role-play multiple times with different partners resulting
in different conversations. Comparison of these conversations leads to a powerful
class discussion that expands students’ knowledge of situational leadership.
The next two articles, “The Loki Equipment Exercise: Part 1—Leading Change” by
Alex Romney, Christopher Hartwell, and Luis Armenta and “The Loki Equipment
Exercise Part 2—Crisis Management” by Alex Romney, Christopher Hartwell, Jake
Harrison, and Mitchell Pound, use the setting of a manufacturing company, Loki
Equipment, while presenting different experiential activities for management students.
The first uses this context to expand students’ understanding of change theories and
provides them the opportunity to examine resistance to change and challenges faced
during change. The second explores crisis management at the organization through a
role-play exercise. Students are provided the change to explore different options to
managing a crisis while becoming more aware of the challenges managers face.
In the next article, “The Stages of Team Development: Examples from the RealWorld,” Stephen Young builds on classroom and textbook material of the five stages
of team deployment by presenting an experiential exercise that provides real-world
examples of teams at each stage. The author also provides an additional optional stage
that looks at the stages of team development through two popular movies, Top Gun
and Moneyball.
Finally, Valerie Labun Christian and Mary Garlington Trefry present an exercise
that examines Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI to make recommendations to
Pope Francis in the Three Popes: Lessons in Leadership—The Powerful Learnings of
Predecessors in Developing One’s Leadership Style and Approach. By focusing on
leaders in the same organization, we learn about how incoming leaders can be effective through study and reflection on the leaders of the past. This also helps students
learn out to improve their own leadership skills.
References
Capitano, J., Fisher, K. L., & Bozeman, J. (2022). Butterfly film festival: Teaching transformational leadership. Management Teaching Review, 7(2), 114–123.
Leroy, H. L., Anisman-Razin, M., Avolio, B. J., Bresman, H., Stuart Bunderson, J., Burris,
E. R., Claeys, J., Detert, J. R., Dragoni, L., Giessner, S. R., Kniffin, K. M., Kolditz,
T., Petriglieri, G., Pettit, N. C., Sitkin, S. B., Van Quaquebeke, N., & Vongswasdi, P.
(2022). Walking our evidence-based talk: The case of leadership development in business schools. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 29(1), 5–32. https://doi.
org/10.1177/15480518211062563
Polin, B. (2019). The leadership exploration project: Development and analysis of a leader definition and persuasive presentation. Management Teaching Review, 4(2), 119–137.
Stratton, M. T., Clayton, R., Schaffer, B., & Julien, M. (2022). Mutiny in the Band of Brothers:
A juxtaposition of two leaders. Management Teaching Review, 7(2), 180–192.
Tyran, K. L. (2017). Preparing to lead: A leadership philosophy exercise for business students.
Management Teaching Review, 2(4), 258–268.