The Change Game

Abstract

Leading change is an essential skill for managers. Instructors in management education must not only teach theories on effectively leading change but also convince students of the necessity of developing their change leadership skills. Students may underestimate the difficulty of convincing others to work toward change; the authors developed the Change Game as a tool to help students experience the difficulties of leading change and identify opportunities for skill development in the area of change leadership. This 45-minute exercise can be used with a range of courses in management curricula, and it scales well for small to large seated classes. Students are divided into two groups (managers and workers) that must cooperate to complete a task and earn a reward. The exercise simulates resistance to change by giving the workers an incentive to stay with the status quo. Classes typically fail to complete the task, which allows for a lively follow-up discussion on successfully leading change, as well as on topics such as communication, intergroup dynamics, trust, power, and motivation.

The ISR-1 Drug Case: A Decision-Making Exercise

“…As part of the development of this exercise, we facilitated feedback from 394 (223 female) students with a mean age of 23.83 years (SD = 7.14), from 13 course sections (seven undergraduate, three graduate, and three executive education classes). To do so, we developed a measure of six items pertaining to the extent to which students felt that the exercise was consistent with our learning objectives (Lewis & Grosser, 2012). We also assessed perceived interest/enjoyment (e.g., "I enjoyed doing this exercise very much," seven items, α = .94) and value/usefulness (e.g., "I believe doing this exercise could be beneficial to me," seven items, α = .91) of the exercise using two subscales of the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (Deci et al, 1994;McAuley et al, 1989).…”

Wastewater Wars: Using Persuasion Tactics to Overcome Cognitive Distortions

“…A primary task in facilitating change is overcoming resistance to that change (Shimoni, 2017). Resistance to change can come from a variety of sources, including barriers to change that are embedded in organizational structure (Lewis & Grosser, 2012), the interpersonal dynamics among employees and managers (Tucker & Edmondson, 2003), a lack of responsiveness to employee voice (Morrison, 2014), and cognitive distortions in communication (Abatecola et al, 2018). Cognitive distortions such as overgeneralization, which emanate from systematic biases, are ubiquitous to the communication process and so difficult to recognize in oneself that they tend to serve as particularly troublesome sources of resistance to change (Cialdini, 2001).…”