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N.C. A&T Professor Develops Leaders in a Unique Way

Students at North Carolina A&T State University are products of the “video game generation”.  They’ve grown up with them, played with them most of their lives, and probably can’t imagine a world without them.  One professor at the University wants to capitalize on that video game culture, by using the same kind of technology to improve leadership skills.

Dr. Alice Stewart, Associate Professor of Strategic Management in the School of Business and Economics at North Carolina A&T State University (NCA&T) is the Principal Investigator on the “– Developing 21st Century Leaders Using 21st Century Technology, project.  The goal is to use technology to improve leadership skills in upper level honors students.

In an effort to determine the best way to train students in developing leadership skills, honors students across the university were assigned to one of two different groups.  Regardless of the student’s assigned group, the purpose was to teach him or her how to work more effectively within an organization.

According to Stewart, “There are two groups: traditional and non-traditional.  The traditional students are taught leadership skills using conventional methods such as lecture, discussion, and cases.  The nontraditional students play a computer simulated video game (Virtual Leader) to learn how to accomplish tasks within an organization.”

Virtual Leader simulates real life events that take place within a work environment. Students act as managers in the game to help them understand leadership techniques. The goal is to assist students in learning and fully understanding cause and effect; that their actions and attitudes have consequences in organizational life. 

Given the nature of technology today and the level of sophistication of computer simulated games that students use for their entertainment, the underlying idea behind Virtual Leader is to create a better way to utilize technology to teach students the fundamentals of leadership. 

After evaluating the two groups, Stewart found that the Virtual Leader students were more effective.  “Students trained in the Virtual Leader tended to interact up and down and across the organization to a greater degree.  There was more of the cross talk outside of their organizational silos than was seen with students trained in the traditional way.  They were not trained or told to communicate this way but apparently they saw something in the simulation that told them that it was a good thing to do,” said Stewart.   She added, “The traditionally trained student tended to talk to people within their silos or to the person that had the same role as they did, but they did not go up and down and across.” 

 “This research is very promising.  This project seeks to improve a future manager’s social awareness and their understanding of people when interacting with them.  We have a unique set of things going on at A&T that could really move us to the cutting edge of business education.  It’s not just the research –  the use of computer based simulations and other experiential learning activities represents a new way of helping people learn that might be more effective, particularly in areas like business where there is this kind of practice element ,” said Stewart.

According to Stewart, bad management costs everybody something.  “Just imagine if everybody in the whole world could be just a little bit better at managing each other, how much better a world would it be.  A lot of people are bad managers, not because they want to be bad managers, but because they have never really learned better techniques.  They don’t know that what they are doing doesn’t work.  And unfortunately, many only know negative ways of getting people to do what they want them to do – threatening them, coercing them, embarrassing them, etc.  All the research reveals that these are not the best ways to get people to do things.”

For additional information, contact Setaria Watson, watsons@ncat.edu at (336) 334-7995.

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