8-05-03
RESEARCH EARNS BEST PAPER AWARD
FOR PENN STATE ERIE MANAGEMENT PROFESSORS
An award-winning research paper by two Penn State Erie professors has demonstrated the major benefits students gain from a "capstone" strategy course integrating the fundamental elements of a business degree program. Management professor Diane H. Parente, Ph.D. and her colleague, Randy C. Brown, contributed their paper to the Journal of Management Education, which named it the year's most outstanding article on the teaching of organizational behavior and management. As a result, the pair recently received the journal's 2003 Fritz J. Roethlisberger Memorial Award.
Parente and Brown, who teach in the Sam and Irene Black School of Business at Penn State Behrend, and co-author John Stephan of SUNY Buffalo, received the award at the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society's Annual Meeting in Springfield, Massachusetts. Their paper is titled "Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Balancing Functional and Integrative Knowledge Using Large Scale Simulations in Capstone Business Strategy Classes."
"The success of their business education rests on the students' ability to integrate their learning in the corporate world," said Parente. "Students who are able to see both the forest and the trees will have a competitive advantage. Based on our research, the capstone course offered in the Sam and Irene Black School of Business is preparing students well for their leadership roles in business."
Parente and Brown developed the capstone course approximately ten years ago and, with Stephan, have refined it along the way. The course, titled "Strategic Management and Business Policy," uses large scale simulation (LSS), a teaching method that helps students comprehend the integrative nature of business in today's competitive environment. The authors found that students who go into the LSS with a narrow focus on their own functional areas of study (for example, accounting, or marketing) came out of the course with an improved understanding of the need for a cross-functional, integrated business perspective.
"The LSS approach brings the corporation into the classroom," said Brown. "Students are expected to present themselves in a professional manner, both in action and dress." Throughout the semester, the corporate teams prepare and present, among other things, a strategic plan, an annual report, a mission statement, an operations plan, and a case study. Each team also presents a report to the board of directors, with the course instructor playing the role of the board chair, and other faculty members invited to play the role of board members.
The LSS gets off to a fast start, with student teams, or "corporate top-management teams" being formed within the second week of the course. Each team is headed by a chief executive officer, self-nominated and selected by the professor following individual interviews. The CEOs conduct in-class interviews, then meet as a group and select their team's members through negotiation. Each CEO ends with a team that includes vice presidents in finance, marketing, administration, production, or technology.
The course requires each team to produce what Parente and Brown call functional, integrative, and management information systems (MIS) "deliverables." Functional deliverables are documents and presentations such as annual reports and job descriptions which require the use of knowledge and skill in a particular functional area. Integrative deliverables, such as a board of directors presentation and a case study, require the team to share and combine information and expertise from a several different functional areas. Because the MIS major is so strong at Penn State Erie, Parente and Brown have added a technology-based MIS deliverable to the course. Grades for the course are based primarily on the deliverables produced by each team.
Brown advises students to create working computer information systems for their simulated corporations. "In fact," Brown said, "one Web-based reporting system, used by its creator in a job interview, helped land the student a job offer."
"At the beginning of the course, students think that functional deliverables are more important, because they view the course, and the resulting grade, through their own narrow focus," said Parente. "At the end of the course, following a semester of LSS, students understand and recognize the greater importance of integrative-shared-deliverables." The authors also found that after a semester of LSS, the importance of functional deliverables either stayed the same or decreased.
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Contact:
Loretta Brandon
814-898-6063 (O)
E-mail: lzb6@psu.edu