Graduate Business Education Research Articles

Building Opportunities for Women in Graduate Business Education

Building Opportunities for Women in Graduate Business Education

Moral beacons: Understanding moral character and moral influence.

We introduce the concept of moral beacons-individuals who are higher in moral character than their peers and prominent within their social environment-and examine the degree to which moral beacons increase the moral awareness of their peers. Using data from cohorts of students in graduate business education across two universities, we applied theory and methods from organizational behavior, personality psychology, and social networks analysis to test two research questions about moral beacons. We used latent profile analysis of data from personality questionnaires and social network surveys completed by graduate business students at two universities (N = 502) to identify individuals classified as moral beacons. We used peer nominations and an in-class business case discussion exercise to assess moral influence. Latent profile analysis identified a latent class of moral beacons in our sample. These individuals received more nominations from their peers in end-of-class surveys as guides for moral thought and action and positively impacted the moral awareness of their peers in a discussion of a difficult business case about possible lead poisoning of employees, but did not significantly change their counterparts' moral awareness in a different case. These results provide promising initial evidence that moral beacons can be distinguished from their peers by both moral character and social prominence and can act as guides for others, at times encouraging greater consideration of the moral aspects of situations and decisions. As these results are the first of their kind, we encourage further replication and investigations of moral beacons and moral influence in other settings.

The Genesis of Gender Diversity at the Top: The Imprinting Effect of Graduate Business Education

The Genesis of Gender Diversity at the Top: The Imprinting Effect of Graduate Business Education

The Perceived Effects of Graduate Business Education on Personal and Professional Development: An Empirical Study

There is a debate around the world about the role of higher education institutions in emerging economies in producing employable graduates. With the industry's ever-changing requirements, do the graduates have the required knowledge, skills, values, attributes, and competency to cope with the job's requirements? Are the students able to contribute positively to the organization they work for? This paper examines the perceived effects of graduate business education in attaining personal and professional development like leadership skills, managerial capabilities, increase in salary, job status, job change, and overall standard of living of graduates. This study aims to understand the impact of graduate business education on graduates’ careers. Career impact is measured in terms of change in leadership positions, increase in salary, job status, job change, and standard of living. The study’s implication is to understand the expected unexpected industry accordingly, bring changes in the curriculum, and assist business schools in taking initiatives to increase the employability of graduates.

Capitalism and Distributive Justice: Musings of a Mormon Economist

Capitalism and Distributive Justice: Musings of a Mormon Economist

Future Skills: Developing Skills for Jobs that Do Not Yet Exist in Sectors that Have Not Yet Been Invented

In this paper, the author reconsiders the question of whether compulsory education systems are ‘fit for purpose’, when the purpose is to provide adequately educated people with the Knowledge, Skills, and Attributes (KSAs) that allow them to be useful and productive members of society. By the use of structural unemployment rates, the author shows that even though the populations were increasing, unemployment remained the same over a long period suggesting that the right KSAs were being provided. The author then considers the changes to compulsory education that occurred in the last two decades of the 20th century in medium and high-income societies, and how this has, potentially, broken the link between the KSAs provided and the KSAs needed. He ends with a call for action to rethink the provision of tertiary education so as to ensure those experiencing it are fitted with the skills needed for the future. This paper was delivered as the keynote opening speech at the iCiTRA conference in Malaysia in September 2021, the text itself is taken from the author’s 2017 paper Unfit for Purpose? Graduate business education and the real world: a reflective and evidence-based discussion about education, jobs and unemployment. Keywords: Fit for purpose; Compulsory education systems; KSAs

Editorial: business education in profound disruption

PurposeThis editorial aims to discuss 11 trends that are driving changes in business education, especially for Master of Business Administration (MBA) curriculum programming.Design/methodology/approachThe editorial provides introspection, personal reflections and conceptualization using current literature.FindingsThe authors discuss 11 drivers that are influencing graduate business education. These drivers include the demographic cliff, the K-shaped recovery, MBA degrees losing their allure, emergence of two pricing structures, the rise of online universities, certificates and micro-credentials, the massive open online course (MOOC) MBA programs, MOOCs and certification, Grow with Google, Outsourcing MBA instruction and business education relevancy.Research limitations/implicationsTraditional university and college graduate business education providers must realize that the educational industry is experiencing a revolutionary disruption and that many universities will fail to meet learners’ expectations for relevant skills and organizational demands for employees who have specific skills for employability.Practical implicationsLearners will no longer rely on traditional four-year universities to obtain business skills.Originality/valueThis work synthesizes a disparate set of drivers that are affecting all graduate business educational providers.

Using Monte Carlo Simulation as a Financial Modeling Tool to Support Sustainability Efforts of a Government Agency

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) collects ecosystem data to support coastal resource conservation and management activities by studying stressors that impact estuaries such as the Chesapeake Bay, which is the largest in the United States. This paper seeks to help NOAA justify its existence and its budget by utilizing Monte Carlo simulation as a financial modeling tool, with such simulations providing insights on how to allocate identified resources. The results of the study offer an innovative method for helping government managers decide how much money to spend, what to spend it on, and how to acquire resources for the Chesapeake Bay Interpretive Buoy System. Moreover, this paper also demonstrates how an experiential project in graduate business education can be used to support sustainability efforts by addressing community-focused issues while improving student connection between theory and application at the same time.

Creativity in graduate business education: Constitutive dimensions and connections

ABSTRACT This conceptual paper examines enabling principles for creative capability in business students. It offers a review of creativity education in business and examines learning experiences that support learners in their understanding and development of their own personal creative abilities. A dynamic model is presented that supports the learning and teaching of creative capability. Actionable strategies to operationalise the model are included. The paper concludes with a discussion addressing new and open questions, implications and future directions to scale and study the teaching and learning of creativity in graduate business education.

CEOs and graduate business education

Critics questioned whether master of business administration (MBA) education can have long-term impact on one’s career. Focusing on top management positions, the author attempts to assess whether chief executive officers (CEOs) with an MBA perform better by looking at the performance of the firms that the CEOs lead. The empirical results revealed that CEOs with MBA do not perform better, whereas CEOs with another advanced degree outperformed other CEOs. Although the empirical analyses support the critics’ claims, the author does not take a strong view that MBA is not valuable. On the other hand, the author feels that perhaps the contribution of the degree is not well captured in numbers or perhaps adjustments are needed for the curricula.

Post Graduate Business Education: Tracing through Different Learning Methods in Controversial Subjects Teaching

‘Business, Government and Society’ is one of the subjects for the Management curriculum at most of the B-Schools and the National Institute of Technology Calicut is also one such. The subject includes two components - business and government, and business and society; the teaching of this subject involves great challenges primarily due to the nature of the subject itself and also because of the diversity of the student group. The subject predominantly deals with:a) How the society influences the ethics of business.b) How the strategies of the government are linked with business.These issues need to be highlighted because India is a pluralistic society and hence the great variation in the degree of the awareness of the issues under discussion within the scope of this subject as well as the huge dissimilarity in their level of acceptance of certain elements pertaining to these issues, especially so, because they belong to the different communities. The students for the Management programme at the National Institute of Technology Calicut come from various communities across India. This study explores how the students respond to the different methods of learning namely, conventional learning, collaborative learning, and cooperative learning and also analyses which of these methods promote a healthy cognitivism in the students. The study was conducted among ten students (five from Kerala and five from non-Kerala) across five different batches over the years, 2012-2017. It was noted that through conventional learning there was hardly any change in the students’ personal ideologies which were often in conflict with the ideologies of the other students. It was also noted that it was through collaborative and cooperative learning methods that the students were able to diffuse their personal political ideologies in the larger interests of the state. It was also noted that through the method of cooperative learning for the teaching of this subject, that the cognitive development in the students was encouraged. The relevance of including such a subject in the curriculum was thus established and the goals of teaching the subject were also fulfilled because it helped in creating better student awareness and also traced a better way for the students to arrive at solutions for the problems concerned.

An Evolving Model of the Use of Feature Films in Undergraduate and Graduate Business Curriculum: The Education Awakens

This paper/exploratory analysis presents an evolving model for enhancing the use of full-length, feature film as a tool in undergraduate and graduate business curriculum. This model includes processes for determination of student perceptions of the efficacy of the use of feature film to teach business, including marketing and human resources competencies. Therefore, this work considers student perceptions of the use of film in undergraduate and graduate business education and their final outcomes. Awareness of students' views of this tool can be valuable information during the design of business curriculum. To date, limited research has coupled the business students’ perceptions of film in business curriculum along with implementation of feature films in business pedagogy. Therefore, the evolution of a working model aims to contribute to the understanding of students' expectations when film is used in business curriculum. There is a dearth of literature that covers the use of popular, full-length films in Marketing and in MBA Human Resource courses. This paper helps to fill that gap.

Learning Not to Diversify: The Transformation of Graduate Business Education and the Decline of Diversifying Acquisitions

Once a preferred strategy, corporate diversification into disparate lines of business has gradually declined in the U.S. over the past several decades. We argue that changes that occurred in a closely related domain—graduate business education—are important in understanding variation in de-diversification across firms. Building on a historical account of the transformation of business education, we explain how the rise of financial economics and agency-theoretic logic in business education changed students’ views about diversification. Nearly 20 years later, these MBA graduates rose to top decision-making positions and put the brakes on diversification. Using data on CEOs who ran 640 large U.S. corporations from 1985 to 2015, we show that CEOs who earned an MBA before the 1970s actively pursued diversification, whereas the next cohort of CEOs, who had been exposed to agency-theoretic logic in financial economics, refrained from it. We also demonstrate that the degree of managerial discretion moderated the effect of the CEO’s MBA education. Our study shows that institutional change in one domain (i.e., business education) contributed to change in another domain (i.e., corporate diversification), albeit with a considerable time lag.

Case study – how a business school blog can build stakeholder relationships and create added value in an MBA marketing program

Innovation, market orientation, and creative collaboration allow the smartest – not necessarily the biggest – organizations to win in the marketplace. This approach to competitive strategy is applicable in a wide variety of market contexts including business, information, and professional services. In this case study, we explain how one business school delivered enhanced value for its two primary target markets – MBA students and the business community. This was accomplished by designing a strategic communication tool (a faculty blog) to gain a competitive edge in the crowded graduate business education market in South Florida. We clearly demonstrate that organizations can create and add value by activating and implementing corporate entrepreneurial processes, programs, and activities as part of their strategic and competitive marketing efforts. This can be in the form of customer relationship management-oriented blogs or other initiatives. Engaging current and prospective customers and stakeholders is extremely important to success in today’s service-driven competitive educational marketplace and marketspace.

Retraction: Does Graduate Business Education Contribute to Professional Accounting Success?

Retraction: Does Graduate Business Education Contribute to Professional Accounting Success?

Students’ emotions for achievement and technology use in synchronous hybrid graduate programmes: a control-value approach

Synchronous hybrid delivery (simultaneously teaching on-campus and online students using web conferencing) is becoming more common; however, little is known about how students experience emotions in this learning environment. Based on Pekrun’s (2006) control-value theory of emotions, the dual purpose of this study was first to compare synchronous hybrid students who attend online versus on-campus in terms of control, value, emotions and perceived success and second to compare students’ degree of emotional activation in the domains of programme achievement and technology use. Survey data from 101 graduate business students revealed that online students reported significantly higher levels of technology-related anger, anxiety and helplessness. Furthermore, in comparison to their on-campus counterparts, online students more clearly separated their emotions in terms of programme achievement and technology use. Emotions related significantly to students’ perceived success for both programme achievement and technology use, and mediated the effects of control and value appraisals on perceived success.Keywords: online learning; web conferencing; distance education; graduate business education; mediational analysisCitation: Research in Learning Technology 2015, 23: 26097 - http://dx.doi.org/10.3402/rlt.v23.26097

Design in Business Education: A Square Peg in a Round World? By Thomas Lockwood

I was pleased to re‐read Tom's 2002 article for two reasons: First, because I am impressed by how spot‐on his assessment was at the time; and second, because it is no longer (completely) true. What a relief!In today's United States, programs such as the Strategic Design MBA at Philadelphia University, as well as the design MBA degrees at the California College of Art in San Francisco, the Institute of Design in Chicago, and MICA/Johns Hopkins in Baltimore are resounding proof of integrative approaches in an MBA context. Design thinking and systems thinking are interwoven into the ways these programs teach leadership, operations, marketing, and finance. Additionally, business schools such as Rotman at the University of Toronto and Darden at the University of Virginia have robust business design studios and design thinking modules. Other traditional MBA programs are at least now offering one course in design thinking, if not integrating it throughout their program; and their students, if not the faculty at large, have formed “innovation clubs”—code for “This is a safe space for creativity and design thinking.”It is no longer the rule that graduate business education draws a deep demarcation between creativity and strategy. That is a false dichotomy and, as Tom wrote, there is a “rising importance of corporate creativity.” Of course, relative to the UK, Europe, and Asia, the democratization of design in business‐school curricula is still novel. But the “gridlock of curriculum tradition” and accreditation metrics that impeded innovation in graduate business education are melting away and becoming more fluid. This is mainly because the gaps that Tom so rightly identified between design practitioners and business managers, and between industry's embrace of design thinking and academia's reluctant gaze, has been bridged by academic upstarts who are responding to the market's demand to “give us more than a SWOT analysis!”Tom concluded that it could take 10 years before business educators embraced the value of design. He was pretty close. Although it is still true that academia lags behind the current of industry, it is encouraging that there are an increasing number of tributaries in business education forging ahead.

Preparing More than Number Crunchers: Incorporating Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethics in Graduate Business Programs

CSR has become an area of focus for many companies and business leaders. Few can argue that pursuing business practices that have economic, environmental, and social benefits is not worthwhile. Certainly in the recent aftermath of such publically visible ethical failures as Enron, Lehman Brothers, and BP, many involved in graduate business education have called for the inclusion of CSR principles into their programs’ curriculum. This paper explores the need for CSR to be incorporated into graduate business curriculum and looks at how several schools are doing just that. The paper includes a discussion of future research topics and concludes that graduate business programs must increase efforts to include CSR, sustainability, and ethics across the curriculum in order for students to be truly prepared for the demands of the new business world.

Innovative Outcome Assessment in Graduate Business Education and Continuous Improvement

Abstract The changed environment of global economy with painful austerity and restructuring measures causing severe economic dislocations in many diverse parts of the world have brought into focus the usefulness and value of management education in general and graduate management education in particular. The various accrediting bodies in America, Europe and Asia in recent years have shifted their emphasis to ensuring that learning outcomes of students in the program are tied to the goals and missions of the academic institution and meet the needs of the external partners of the academic enterprise that the students go on to serve. This has resulted in rapid advances in the field of innovative outcome assessment, and measurement of competency in performing higher order tasks as well as demonstration of traits related to successful transition into the business world and contribution to the success of the enterprise where the students are employed. The mere assessment/measurement of traits is not the end, but rather the first step in the cycle of continuous improvement in the tradition of the Plan-Do-Study-Act tradition of TQM. The goal is to identify shortcomings or opportunities for improvement via the assessment process and then to “close the loop” by introducing planned changes to improve system performance.

Professional Reflections: The Alignment of Ignatian Pedagogy Principles with Jesuit Business School Education and Business Practices

The article explores the use of professional reflections in graduate business education. The article draws on effective classroom practices, as well as research on action learning and leadership. The article finds an alignment of Ignatian Pedagogy Principles with the empirical research on effective leadership in the business and public sector.