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A critical challenge facing organizations is the dilemma of maintaining the capabilities of both efficiency and flexibility. Recent evolutionary perspectives have suggested that patterns of organizational stability and change can be characterized as punctuated equilibria (Tushman and Romanelli 1985). This paper argues that a learning model of organizational change can account for a pattern of punctuated equilibria and uses a learning framework to model the tension between organizational stability and change. A simulation methodology is used to create a population of organizations whose activities are governed by a process of experiential learning. A set of propositions is examined that predict how patterns of organizational change are affected by environmental conditions, levels of ambiguity, organizational size, search rules, and organizational performance. Implications of this learning model of convergence and reorientation for theory and research are discussed.

This article responds to Andre's AF Managerial Assessment Excercise. The ethics of using deception in an experiential-learning context are explored, and people's susceptibility to and the effects of deception are discussed in the context of situational ethics in the classroom.

There is growing concern that academic institutions need to better prepare students of management by teaching interpersonal leadership skills. Yet bridging the gap between classroom learning and later work performance represents a major challenge to educators. Operant, or behavioral, instructional techniques may help us to meet this challenge. This article (a) reviews current experiential methods in management education; (b) presents an operant conceptualization of transfer; (c) illustrates applications of behavioral instruction in management, social work, and psychology; (d) proposes a comprehensive, classroom-and field-based behavioral approach that management educators may use to teach interpersonal leadership skills; and (e) compares that approach with current experiential methods.

Although textbooks of organizational behavior and management commonly include chapters on power and organizational politics, they uniformly ignore how to develop competency in these areas. Yet students would benefit from learning that organizational politics affects decision making and that their own political behavior can reflect both organizational goals and their individual interests and preferences. To help students determine appropriate political behavior, this article presents guidelines superimposing individual differences on existent models of politics and provides an experiential vehicle for introducing these guidelines.

This paper presents the theoretical basis and the associated perceptions of race relations that characterized a race relations competence workshop which served as the educational component of an overall program to improve race relations among managers within the fictitiously named XYZ Corporation. Workshop activities combined didactic and experiential methods and focused on group and individual levels of learning based on embedded intergroup relations theory. An assessment of the race relations competence workshop was carried out as part of an overall effort to evaluate the race relations improvement program in the company. Employing measures of both global evaluation and perceptions of race relations among managers, the study showed that Blacks evaluated the workshop more favorably than Whites, that reports of having information about the workshop were positively associated with favorable evaluations of the workshop, that workshop participants more than nonparticipants were likely to perceive Whites as hurting Blacks and less likely to perceive Blacks as hurting Whites. Additional analyses showed that, while the workshop generally had favorable effects for participants, the groups most likely to show unfavorable consequences were White male first level managers younger than 41 years and White female first level managers older than 40 years.