The Role of Management Games in Mapping Learning Styles to Elements of Business Know-How Acquisition: A Case Study

Abstract

Introduction Strategic decision making concerns larger personnel groups nowadays than before (Lainema & Lainema, 2007). Employees at lower levels of the organization are participating in decision making with more impact on forming the strategy of the organization (Kabeil, 2008). More than twelve years ago, Senge (1997) predicted that leadership would be more and more distributed among diverse individuals and teams who share the responsibility for creating the organization's strategy. The diverse involvement in decision making means that the organizational processes need to be understood by wider groups of employees. Employees need overall knowledge to complement their function-specific skills. The challenge is to raise the level of understanding of all employees to the domain of business know-how. The business know-how is defined as a combination of knowledge and several different skills that give an overall view of the functioning of a business organization as a whole (Ghoshal, Bartlett, & Moran, 1999). However, the learning process of business, like many other learning domains, has major deficiency of oversimplification (Hakkarainen, Palonen, Paavola, & Lehtinen, 2004). One serious kind of oversimplification is looking at a concept from just one perspective. While business work is increasingly becoming a team and group effort, business schools are looking for new approaches to promote the potential strength of collaboration in business education. One way of doing it is management game. Management game is often seen as a vehicle, which is used for helping to visualize and rehearse strategy in holistic approach. It makes it possible to sketch the organizational cause-and-effect relationships and to communicate more clearly with structures that translate decisions into actions (Morecroft, 1999). The use of management games in business education has been documented through a series of surveys (Faria, 2001; Gilgeous & D'Cruz, 1996). Lainema and Lainema (2007) consider management game as one of the critical learning elements for advancing acquisition of business know-how. Connolly and Stansfield (2007) demonstrate the use of management games in e-learning. Benbunan-Fich (2002) and Hoffman (2003) show some statistics on the impact of using management games on education and training. Moores and Chang (2001) and Martin (2000) give examples of business games that are developed to support the teaching of management information systems. Stolk (2001) demonstrates the use of management games in crisis management. Doyle and Brown (2000) show how they use a business management game to teach applied skills and the benefits and the challenges of using student teams from multiple countries. Faria (2001) found that 65.7% of schools accredit by the AACBS (Association to Advance Collegiate Business Schools) used a game in their strategic management courses and instructors devoted from 2.0% to 80.0% of their class time to the game they were using, with 23.8% being their average class time usage. For that work, the instructors based 25.1% of their course's grade on the game. They also reported that games were the most effective way to teach strategic management. The main purpose of this paper is to assess the role of management games in mapping elements of business know-how acquisition to different learning styles in a specific environment. The business education environment is of the College of Business Administration, University of Sharjah, UAE (http://www.sharjah.ac.ae) where a management game is developed for this purpose. The main approach is to identify the learning elements for advancing acquisition of business know-how in a specific environment, to investigate the learning style preferences of business students in the given environment, and to measure the perspectives of students on the impact of the game on advancing their capability of business know-how acquisition. …