Taking Your Talents to Business Communications

Abstract

We describe an in-class activity that helps students improve their skills in media selection and use to reinforce effective communication. The activity builds on media richness and channel expansion theories through an examination of the media selection and use of NBA athlete LeBron James and Cleveland Cavaliers majority owner Dan Gilbert during James’s career moves. We utilize three minicase studies highlighting James’s and Gilbert’s videos and open letters. We provide guidelines for preparing and implementing the activity and present students’ reactions through their in-class participation and quantitative survey responses. Student evaluations, collected from both a required undergraduate course and a graduate elective course, indicate that students found this activity engaging and effective in achieving the learning objectives. In addition to business communication courses, this in-class activity may be used in other courses including organizational behavior, introduction to business and management, leadership, human resources management, introduction to public relations, and crisis management.

A Critique of Transmission Communication Models in Introductory Management and Organizational Behavior Textbooks

“…This article follows in the footsteps of several others published in this journal (e.g., Brandhorst, 2019;Cohen, 2019;Darics, 2019;Manisaligil & Bilimoria, 2016) regarding the teaching of communication as well as those in other management education outlets, such as Bridgman et al (2019) that advocate for questioning commonly accepted models. We also see this piece contributing to scholarship that considers the centrality of communication to business education, such as Wright et al (2021) and Kleckner and Butz (2021).…”

Human Resource Management Reimagined: A New Perspective on HR Courses for Contemporary Careers

“…This is not to say that HR educators do not try to make the classes lively and interactive. On the contrary, HR educators put a great deal of effort into making HR alive and providing immersive and experiential learning for students, using exercises (Renard, 2008), cases (Manisaligil & Bilimoria, 2016), movies (Bumpus, 2000), simulations (Bedell et al, 2007; North-Samardzic & de Witt, 2019) and full-blown service-learning projects (Madsen & Turnbull, 2006). However, the challenge is that while these techniques improve the process element of teaching HR, they fail to fully address the gap in the course’s content element.…”