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This paper examines the relationship between MBA students' performance and participation in two online environments: a synchronous forum (chat room) and an asynchronous forum (discussion board). The quality and quantity of students' participation is used to predict their final exam and course grade performance outcomes. We find that the total quality of students' participation is positively related to final exam performance but the total quantity of students' participation is related to overall course performance. We also find that synchronous engagement with the course (combined quality and quantity) drives these results and has twice the exam and grade impact relative to asynchronous course engagement. We conclude that encouraging high quality and frequent participation in both synchronous and asynchronous forums will help maximise student performance.

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Over the past decade, there has been a notable increase in discussions surrounding the integration of global sustainability issues and responsible management practices into the business school curriculum. What we have yet to see, however, and what we would like to begin with this introduction, is a meaningful discussion regarding the overarching goals of sustainable and responsible management education as they relate to the available teaching and learning resources in this domain. To achieve this, we first identify the tensions between teaching sustainability to change the world for the better and those aimed at making companies better off. We propose that there should be a balance between these two aspirations. We then turn to the thoughts of academic practitioners in the field with a survey of 169 management and sustainability instructors. Results indicate that respondents use papers, cases, and videos to teach courses in this field, while textbooks and electronic resources (i.e. databases, simulations, and apps) are only marginally utilized. The respondents are only moderately satisfied with most of the available teaching resources as well as the integration of existing resources within general curricula. The results show some interesting differences between postgraduate and undergraduate courses and also between junior and senior instructors. In this introduction, we argue that the moral enthusiasm for teaching in the sustainability domain must not take away from precise analysis of problems, solutions, their implementability, and their interconnected complexity. As such, we propose a set of five recommendations for the design and selection of sustainability management teaching resources that will effectively address issues related to planet, people, and profits

To embed goal theories more deeply in the domain of top-level leadership behavior and to provide a vehicle to facilitate future research, the authors developed a taxonomy of managerial goals. Interviews with 75 company leaders-founders and presidents-from 3 countries generated 2,182 articulated goals. Content analysis supported 2 taxonomic dimensions: goal content and hierarchical level. The goal content dimension specified 10 categories of substantive goal targets, and the second dimension captured the hierarchical structure of the top leaders' goal sets, with lower-level goals being instrumental toward achieving superordinate goals. The hierarchy comprised 5 goal levels: ultimate, enterprise, strategic, project, and process. Chi-square analyses revealed relationships between goal content and hierarchical level as well as differences between the national subsamples.