2008 - Marketing Educators' Association

exchange various opinions and work collectively, we
design a few ice-breaking class activities in order to
help students with such team environments at the
beginning of the course.
On the other hand, we also have out-of-the-class
cross-disciplinary team learning to let our students
(1) establish meaningful connections among various
disciplines and opinions, and (2) learn fundamental
managerial skills in organizations. Students are
expected to communicate their own ideas and
approaches clearly to other students from different
backgrounds in the group. Students can learn
various managerial skills such as teamwork,
leadership, integration of different perspectives and
values to their own opinions, constructive conflict
and consensus building, and time management.
We continue in-the-class cross-disciplinary team
learning until the end of a course. However, in the
first half of the course, we create more chances for
controlled in-class activities while we will gradually
shift the activities to less controlled activities such as
group presentations, work out activities, and class
facilitations. At the end of the first half of the course,
all teams must submit group activities evaluation
reports to their lecturer. The lecturer should use the
performance reports to directly give suggestions,
encouragement, and recognition to each team.
In addition to the performance reports, crossdisciplinary
teams are asked to invite the lecturer to
their group studies at least four times per course,
which will be two times for the first half of the course
and another two times for the rest of the course. We
are expected to (1) participate in the group studies
as a member, and (2) offer direct suggestions and
recognition to the groups. This gives us constant
chances for mentoring groups.
MENTORING COMPONENT OF HEM
The mentoring component is designed to support
students’ self-development throughout the course.
Self-development means not only learning basic
concepts but also developing career paths and
learning skills continuously. Therefore, the main
goals of the mentoring component are (1) to give our
students appropriate direct assistance for career and
learning skill development, and (2) to keep their
motivation high throughout the course.
We use the self-leadership approach to keep our
students’ motivation constantly at a high level.
According to Manz (1992), a self-leader is a
continuously self-motivated person who will be very
effective not only for managerial success in
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organizations but also for personal development and
self-actualization. In addition, we found that ways to
develop self-leadership satisfy various prerequisites
for successful college education (Light, 2004). This
shows the importance of self-leadership for our
project.
As Manz (1992) also stated, each self-leader must
have goals for personal accomplishment and the
goals should be related to self-motivation, selfdetermination,
self-confidence, self-satisfaction, and
self-actualization. To let our students have such
goals, we use management by objectives (MBO)
which requires clear and challenging goals from both
short-term and long-term perspectives, appropriate
coaching and controlling plans, visible performance
measurements, and timely feedback (Raymond,
2006). In addition, we found MBO effective for
increasing levels of responsibility and the
commitment of participants to achieve their goals
(Odiorne, 1992). While MBO is considered a handsoff
supervision technique (Odiorne, 1991), we have
several individual MBO meetings with our students
to constantly create occasions for recognition,
encouragement, support, and self-confidence.
In order to use MBO effectively, we use MBO sheets
which show goals, majors, interests, and career
planning. In addition to the items, we ask all
students to perform SWOT (strengths, weakness,
opportunities, threats) analyses and bring the results
with the MBO sheets. SWOT analysis has been
used with MBO frequently because knowing the
participants’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities,
and threats are expected to help them to make more
realistic goals and effective action plans (Williamson,
Jenkins, & Moreton, 2003).
In order to be more specific about HEM, we begin
the mentoring component with clear instructions
about MBO and SWOT analysis for our students.
We try to make sure that all students understand
appropriate ways and the value of these methods for
their career and learning skills development in their
courses. Once students complete their MBO sheets,
we go over the contents of the sheets with them.
Especially, we will make sure that objectives are
realistic, challenging, and meaningful.
Our introductory assignment is to let our students
make their own goals and perform SWOT analyses.
This assignment is due at the first session of the
second week. Then, there is the first individual
meeting with each student to complete MBO
planning together so that each student will have at
least clearly defined objectives and action plans.