Simulations For Strategy Courses: Measuring Teamwork

Abstract

Simulations are an important part of capstone strategy courses - they facilitate transfer of training by providing “learning-by-doing” opportunities to the students. They also allow instruc-tors to provide authentic activities situated amidst relevant con-text, enable learners to grasp not just ‘how’ an activity must be done, but the ‘why,’ the ‘what, and the ‘with whom.’ Simula-tions have become an accepted part of strategy classes both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. One area that has not been fully explored is the impact of teamwork on simulation results. Professors using simulations believe anecdotally what the literature on teamwork has suggested for decades: the qual-ity of team processes is directly correlated to the quality of team results. However, detailed measurements are lacking. This pa-per uses a graduate strategy course as an exploratory study to see if there was a relationship between teamwork and team re-sults. It then includes a just completed graduate course to pro-vide additional data for this study which illustrates some of the complexity in evaluating team performance.