مقاله سال ۲۰۱۷

 مجله بین المللی آموزش مدیریت – The International Journal of Management Education

Introductory management courses are foundation stones in undergraduate business curriculum (Thompson, Purdy, & Fandt, 1997). They aim at providing basic knowledge of the field while expertise in different areas of management is further developed in advanced management courses (Swenson, 2001). These courses serve to “heighten awareness of the complexity of what occurs when humans are engaged in the accomplishment of tasks in an organization” (Krell & Dobson, 1999, p. 44). These courses also communicate to students the idea that management as a field of practice is informed by theory (Wright & Gilmore, 2012). In other words, these courses include threshold concepts, which might be hard for students to grasp at first, but which are essential for their successful completion of other courses in the program.

One of the challenges that instructors in these introductory courses face is that traditional business and management education students usually have very little exposure to how organizations work. These students have little work experience (Finan, 2004) and struggle to connect theory with their own experiences within organizations (Miller, 1991). The more experience students have, the easier it becomes to understand course material, grasp concepts and theories, make connections among them, and make decisions. Not surprisingly, non-traditional students who come to get their business degrees after spending years working “seem to have almost an intuitive understanding of how business organizations work, who the ‘players’ are, and how individuals interact in business organizations” (Roth, 2001, p. 22).

“Management certainly applies science: managers have to use all the knowledge they can get, from the sciences and elsewhere. But management is more art, based on ‘insight’, ‘vision’, ‘intuition’” (Mintzberg, 2004, p. 10). Not surprisingly, management positions are difficult to fill (Society for Human Resource Management [SHRM], 2016). Over 60% of HR managers experience difficulties in hiring candidates for full-time managerial positions in general (SHRM, 2016), and 74% of HR managers experience difficulties in hiring recent graduates for these positions (SHRM, 2015a). Once hired as low-level or front-line managers, recent graduates work on the frontline of the organization “where the organization interacts with its customers and suppliers, and confronts the realities and challenges of competition” (Fleming, 2008, p. 128). They become responsible for the performance of a team (Austin, Regan, Gothard, & Carnochan, 2013; Hill, 1992), enacting organizational policies, providing organizational leadership for their teams, and coaching each individual team member (Kilroy & Dundon, 2015).