Learning to Differentiate Leadership from Managerial Position

This paper describes a rationale for the development of individual leadership abilities and skills in manners contrary to traditional approaches to instruction in leadership theory. Traditional leadership perspectives reflect mechanistic and bureaucratic concepts that portray the organization as an authority hierarchy with influence flowing down from the top. Leadership is thus an executive function and prerogative. Although individual leadership theories often say, in passing, that anyone can be a leader, preoccupation is with authority-figure performance. However, educators need to become concerned with teaching students and members of organizations how to recognize and act on opportunities and responsibilities to exert influence without the benefit of managerial position. The paper also discusses an attempt to use these concepts at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater during the Spring, 1996 semester. Analysis of student performance indicated that teaching people to comprehend and experience leadership from a non-positional perspective may not be done easily for some types of individuals

Personality Characteristics and Group Performance In Total Enterprise Simulations

This study was designed to test the proposition, advanced by Patz and others, that teams dominated by Myers-Briggs Type Indicator “thinking” and “intuiting” styles perform better in total enterprise simulation games. This study found no relation between such factors and simulation performance of groups of undergraduate business seniors

Antecedents of Learning in Simulations

This purpose of this study was to discover the why some students learn more than others in Total Enterprise Simulations. This study was undertaken using 71 senior policy students playing the MICROMATIC. Two measures of learning were utilized. One involved a test of analytical principles extracted from the MICROMATIC, and the second consisted of open-ended questions asking the students what they were learning. Very generally, the results suggest that learning is greater when learners are confident, interested, motivated, and understand

Simulations and Learning: Dialog and Directions

This paper describes a basis for a panel discussion and workshop focusing on aspects of participant learning in simulations. Fifteen types of independent variables are identified as possible bases for examining learning. These provide an opening framework for discussion of on-going and possible learning investigations. The objective is to foster commitment to research focusing on simulation learning. Participants in the panel portion of the workshop are Joseph Wolfe, Jerry Gosen, Precha Thavikulwat, Phil Anderson and John Washbush

STudent Attitudes about Policy Course Simulations

The purposes of this study are (1) to describe the use of the Simulation Participation Attitude Scale (SPAS) to measure attitudes of business students toward whole enterprise simulations and (2) to examine student attitude differences associated with exposure to different simulations