Millennials’ Leadership Skills for Promoting Flow and Profit in a Business Simulation

Abstract

Driven in part by the demands of an increasing number of millennial employees, organizations continue to shift away from traditional, hierarchical, command and control business strategies that may have focused solely on generating profit to enabling organizational cultures that focus on both people and profit. In the leadership business simulation, FLIGBY®, one approach to meeting the needs of the organization's people while generating profit is through promoting flow at work. The flow experience is the mental state of being motivated and fully immersed in an activity, resulting in energized focus and profound enjoyment, overall happiness and well‐being, and enhanced job and task performance. The current study analyzed data from 1,184 millennial managers who played FLIGBY®, a business simulation that gamifies leadership skills, flow, and profit outcomes. The results demonstrate strong collinearity among the eight leadership skills of interest, resulting in the factor load of a new singular variable, named social enterprise skill. The new variable was found to predict promoting flow and generating profit.