Game—The Dressing Change Game

Abstract

Many employees face operational failures—missing or insufficient supplies, equipment, information, and personnel—that interfere with their workflow and can negatively impact organizational performance. However, employees often devise methods to work around these obstacles that may come with negative side effects. The Dressing Change Game is a 40-minute in-class exercise that enables students to directly experience workarounds as a natural response to operational failures and allows them to see the trade-off between short-term and longer-term organizational performance that occurs as a result of workarounds. The overarching learning objective is for students to gain an appreciation that optimizing individual- or unit-level performance likely undermines organizational-level performance. Teaching Note: Interested Instructors please see the Instructor Materials page for access to the restricted materials. To maintain the integrity and usefulness of cases published in ITE, unapproved distribution of the case teaching notes and other restricted materials to any other party is prohibited.