Academe & Industry
Designing Student Teams
To make an omelette for employers, you've got to break a few eggs in traditional management education.
By ManMohan S. Sodhi, Clive W. Holtham and Robert Melville
This article describes the motivation, the process and the results regarding our expanded use of teams in a capstone course with 150 students in our master's in management course. We aimed to meet the requirements of employers requiring such attributes as "leadership," "team work," "confidence," "trust" and the "ability to organize," all of which are difficult to aim for in the rigorous analytical curriculum of most management programs. We achieved our aim by expanding the size and scope of teams and present our positive experiences here. Thus, this article presents one way for instructors to leverage team design to meet the objectives of different stakeholders including employers and by providing statistical evidence regarding how well we achieved our aims.
The course in question, "Delivering Customer Value," taught by one of the authors (Sodhi), used six large, self-selected, self-organized teams ranging from 15 to 35 students each with a chief executive officer (CEO) and a few vice presidents (VP) heading conventional functional "departments." The ostensible goal of each team was to create and eventually present a detailed business plan on a new business idea integrating and applying concepts from strategy, marketing, operations and IT, human resources and risk. Results from an anonymous survey on the last day of class indicate that the students believe that they were significantly better off in terms of attributes of interest to employers.
Background
Our M.Sc. in Management program was introduced in 2003, and only a small number of volunteer faculty members were involved in designing it. Both factors helped foster an innovative environment, e.g., by making classes more integrative than those in traditional programs.
The program is aimed at those who intend to work either in a family business (in particular, those from Central and Eastern Europe, China and India) or in consulting, manufacturing and financial services companies. We recruit students in their early 20s with very little work experience. For the group in question, the average age is 23, split nearly equally among women and men. We attract students from throughout the world; at last count, students from 67 different countries had entered the program.
The program runs over 10 months from October to July with a structured induction fortnight. Teaching takes place over three terms ending with a research or practice-based project or dissertation to be completed by the end of July. Students take seven core classes in the first two terms. Delivering Customer Value runs in the second term as a capstone course, followed by electives in the third term. At the end of the first term students decide which of two specialist streams — general management and internal auditing — they wish to follow in the second term. Delivering Customer Value was a core module for only the 102 general management students in the 2004-05 academic year, but the 48 internal auditing students were asked to join the teams as internal auditors.
We had originally designed Delivering Customer Value to integrate concepts from marketing, operations (supply chain management) and information technology. It was first run in the inaugural 2003-04 academic year with self-selected teams of six to eight students asked to come up with a new e-business idea and a poster session explaining its marketing along with back-end supply chain processes and the information infrastructure. The class was highly successful in terms of student enthusiasm and feedback and earned the instructor a teaching award at the university level.
However, we were still confronted with potential employers' feedback in meetings and in the media. Employers emphasize that they are looking for "soft" attributes like teamwork, leadership, confidence, trust and ability to organize. For instance, Chris Richard of Intel is looking for people with "communication, interpersonal and motivational skills to manage teams," while McKinsey's director of global recruiting, Michael Partington, is looking for "intellectual ability but combined more and more with 'softer' skills" (Financial Times, 2005). Businesses are also reportedly increasingly looking for college graduates who can work effectively in teams and understand management processes (Alie et al. 1998).
We also wanted to integrate other areas of the business curriculum, notably strategy and human resources as well as skills such as project management. The students suggested having a time frame shorter than the 10 weeks the course ran. Finally, the internal audit students who were not involved expressed regret at not having been part of this course.
The Course
The second time around, during the 2004-05 academic year, we shortened the time frame to five weeks, expanded the curriculum and redesigned the student teams to be large and self-organized along functional lines. We designed the class to have team-based coursework and an individual exam. The explicit learning outcomes related to integrating and applying concepts from strategy, marketing, operations, human resources, IT and risk analysis. Our unstated goals were meeting the requirements of employers.
Coursework
In the two weeks prior to the beginning of the term, any student could propose a business idea and attract the other general management students to join his or her team, selling not only the merits of the idea but also his or her team of "vice presidents." Only a small number of "companies" were allowed to carry on depending on student interests and the decision of a "Board" comprised of four faculty members whose decision would be final. (In the future, we hope to have employer representatives on the Board as well.) The internal audit students were also required to divide themselves among these companies and provide risk assessment and management expertise.
Seven students presented business ideas in the two weeks prior to the beginning of the term; the Board accepted six of them. These ranged widely: a restaurant chain in the United Kingdom, a plastics packaging company in Russia, a "business" restaurant in London, a concert-organizing company in Serbia, an emergency medical device and service for the U.K., and a student consulting company for small businesses in London. The goal for each team was to develop a detailed business plan covering strategy, marketing and sales, operations and IT, human resources and risk analysis.
Once the term began, most teams had a slow start. Students struggled to find out what exactly they needed to do and how to organize themselves and divide up their tasks. There were also personality clashes within teams and movement — sometimes forced, sometimes voluntary — of personnel from one team to another. But after three weeks, things crystallized as the deadline for presentations in the fifth week loomed large for all the students. We observed teams working late at night in the student café and in meeting rooms.
Fifty percent of an individual's marks came from the team project. The project marks themselves were split evenly between the presentation and the detailed report. To motivate individual contribution in the team assignment, the students were told that the team mark would be marked up or down for individuals based on the perceived contribution by their peers, "subordinates" or "supervisor. Each CEO would evaluate his or her VPs, who would evaluate their respective team members or "colleagues." In turn, the team members would evaluate each other and their VP, and the VPs would also evaluate the CEO (but not each other to reduce the amount of feedback).
In the morning of the last day (week five), students were briefed about the presentations to the Board to be held in the afternoon. Also, the students filled out the peer evaluations of their teammates and provided anonymous feedback regarding whether or not they were better off as regards the aims of the class (that had not been disclosed to them). In the afternoon, the teams presented to the Board members who rated them on the attractiveness of their proposal. For the most part, the CEOs introduced their companies and the VPs provided details and answered questions.
Individual Exam
The remaining 50 percent of an individual's marks came from the individual exam. Even for this we encouraged teamwork. The students were given a list of 40 concepts from strategy, marketing, operations and risk analysis and were told they would be examined on applying these to a case. The case (without the exam questions) was given out a day-and-a-half in advance of the written exam so they could prepare for the exam in groups of their own choice. A clean copy of the case was provided to the students during the exam, as they were not allowed to take any notes with them.
As soon as the case study was available on our Web-based system, the students filled out all the meeting rooms to discuss the case. They had already formed teams of different sizes. Therefore, the "individual" exam became yet another team exercise. Indeed, it was with great pride that we saw these groups working hard all over the school. Thus, we achieved another way for the students to organize themselves and work together as a team. Informal feedback from the students regarding how the exam was conducted has been quite positive.
Results of Survey
The anonymous student survey conducted on the last day of class consisted of 13 questions asking whether or not the student was "better off" or "worse off" in terms of teamwork, organizing, confidence and trust as a result of the five-week experience (Table 1). A five-point scale was provided: -2 for much worse off, -1 for worse off, 0 for same, +1 for better off and +2 for much better off. There were 64 responses, almost all of them from general management students since internal audit students were exempt from attending the lectures.
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One concern we had was that student responses could simply reflect how much the students liked the class or the instructor. If so, the responses would be highly correlated and would therefore be of little value. But our concerns proved unfounded, as the correlations were quite weak among the responses (Table 2).
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Therefore, the averages and distributions of responses to each of the questions (Table 3) likely reflect what the students feel about what they gained rather than about the class itself. The positive results for all questions suggest, therefore, that our key goals regarding employer-motivated soft skills were met, at least in students' perception. Interestingly, some student responses were negative on some of the questions, again indicating that these responses were not simply a result of students' liking the class or the instructor.
Table 3: Frequency count and average for 64 student responses in relation to questions 1-13. There are very few negative responses with most students responding that they are better off ("1") or much better off ("2").
We ordered the average values of the responses to highlight the ordering of the objectives met (Figure 1). The students reported they gained most in terms of the ability to complete a given task within deadline (Q9) and the ability to work in a team (Q1). They felt that they formed more friendships (Q6) and could better apply business concepts in practice (Q7). Other important gains were seen by students in their ability to lead a small team (Q2), their ability to break large tasks into smaller tasks (Q11) and confidence in starting their own business (Q8).
Figure 1: Average responses to all the 13 questions from 64 respondents.
The lowest gains were in students' ability to lead large teams (Q3), in presentation skills (Q5), and, surprisingly, trust in other people's abilities (Q13). The first two are to be expected as only CEOs led large teams and only CEOs and VPs presented. The third probably got diluted due to the frustrations of students in VP and colleague roles who could not get their teammates to deliver within the tight deadlines.
Finally, we checked for differences in responses across students in different roles (CEO/VP/colleague). The average responses by role show the highest values for responses from CEOs (three respondents), followed by VPs (22 respondents) and then by colleagues (36 respondents) (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Average responses to all the 13 questions from 64 respondents with three CEOs, 22 VPs, 36 colleagues and three respondents who did not report their roles.
However, we did not find the differences to be significant using multiple analysis of variance tests, possibly due to the small number of CEOs in the set of respondents. Still, the pattern and intuition does suggest that having responsibility and visibility likely impacts the students' perception about their attributes especially regarding the ability to organize large teams (Q3) or even small teams (Q2) and presentation skills (Q5), as only CEOs and VPs presented. In the future, we may consider role changes and doing the class over 10 weeks rather than five.
Results of Peer Evaluation
One challenge we found was that most respondents rated most of their peers, "supervisor" or those who reported to them as "highly above average." Very few negatives or averages show up in the average score for each person (Figure 3). As a result, we have decided to adjust the team mark downwards only for a few people that have negative marks, but leave the others' individual marks the same as the team mark. The problem of marking is ameliorated somewhat by the individual exam, but the challenge of assessing the individual in a group project remains.
Figure 3: Frequency distribution of the average peer score for the students. The results indicate that most students rated their teammates as +2, i.e., contribution to the team being significantly above average (with -2 being significantly below average and 0 being average). The total is more than 64, as some students did the peer scores later.
Conclusions
All too often, management classes use similar teams without the team size or scope being a design consideration. In fact, in many cases, student teams are assigned at the beginning of the year and remain the same for all classes. Our results suggest that we can achieve the desired results if team design were used more thoughtfully vis-à-vis the goals of different stakeholders: employers, instructors and the students themselves.
Should others follow our model? Significant investment is needed in planning and executing such a course. Also, much remains to be done to be able to convince others to make such an investment. We need to involve employers, for instance, as members of the Board. Finally, we need to take a closer look at assessment that is fair to individuals and to their teams while not being too burdensome for instructors. Despite what remains to be done, we hope we can convince others that team size and scope are not constraints and can be used as design parameters to meet desired outcomes.
ManMohan S. Sodhi (m.sodhi@city.ac.uk) heads the operations management and quantitative methods group at Cass Business School in London. Clive Holtham (c.w.holtham@city.ac.uk) heads the Knowledge Management group at Cass. Rob Melville (w.r.melville@city.ac.uk) was, until recently, the director of the M.Sc. Management program at Cass. The authors would like to thank Professor Elvin Isgrig of North Dakota State University for providing the inspiration and approaches for using large teams and Dr. Byung-Gak Son for help with statistical analysis and for his comments.
References
- Alie R.E., Beam H.B. and Carey T.A., 1998, "The use of teams in an undergraduate management program," Journal of Management Education, Vol. 22, pgs. 707-719.
- Financial Times, 2005, "Shredded credibility? The MBA industry may be facing a shakeout," April 29, p. 17.
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