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Competency in understanding and managing cultural aspects of the corporation has been identified by many scholars as an increasingly important management skill. This article identifies an important component of that skill as a sensitivity to how local organizational symbols shape one's cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. This article sketches a master's of business administration course designed to enhance sensitivity of practicing managers to the symbols that surround and shape them.

In this article, the authors argue that poetry provides a valuable if overlooked resource to the organizational behavior professor. The authors describe a workshop designed to evoke students' innate poetic metaphors to enable a more lively engagement with course material. Because many of students' personal, private, and emotionally charged experiences parallel the various topics in the text, the authors find that the organizational behavior course is particularly amenable to this approach. Finally, the authors present a qualitative assessment, conducted by them, in which students assess the workshop experience in their own words. Students find that the workshop adds complexity, surprise, and excitement to personal issues, transforms the climate of the classroom, and provides an energized backdrop against which the course makes sense in terms that are both personal and deep.

Instructors are responsible for making teaching come to life. This article seeks to energize the classroom through an exploration of the tacit synergies between the language of poetry and the language of management. In the process, the authors delve into both the opportunities and the obstacles in bringing together two disparate discourses. As an autoethnography, the article details a journey that is both personal and professional. It includes a literature search to explore the uses and potential of poetic language, the design of a workshop to enhance the experience of poetry in management professors, and the crafting of classroom activities using poetry to elicit students' felt connections to the course material. In the end, the authors envision a style of teaching rich enough to compete for the center of students' attention—their depth, their creativity, and their stillness of mind.

The traditional formulation of symbols as "bundles of meaning" has supported many fine-grained analyses of organizational culture. However, it tends to obscure deeper psychodynamic elements that are essential to shaping how culture forms, develops, and dies. This paper adapts the idea of "holding environment" from Winnicott, Kegan, and others to sketch the potential contribution of such a psychodynamic perspective. An illustrative case is presented to support the argument.

Traditional management education has been widely criticized for an overemphasis on rational, analytic, arms-length approaches to the detriment of softer, more intuitive capacities. Most critics agree that today's management students are overdrilled in the routines of calculation and analysis, but underprepared for the dynamic and turbulent settings in which managers often find themselves. The arts-based movement has emerged as a corrective to these tendencies. The core of this work involves the transformation of the classroom into an "aesthetic workspace" in which student learning is enhanced through dynamic encounters with art-objects. This article extends the notion of aesthetic workspace to the realm of language itself. It describes a "poetic workspace" in which metaphor is leveraged to create holistic connections between personal insights, appreciation of others, and the content of the course.

This paper has two purposes. First, it conceptualizes the process by which encounter group casualties occur. Primary attention in the literature on encounter group casualties has been trained upon the rate of injury and upon the more or less discrete events which give rise to injury. For example, Lieberman, Yalom, & Miles (1973), the major study thus far, made a rather piecemeal analysis of the causes, listing such discrete factors as attack (by the group or leader), rejection, coercive expectation, and unrealistically high hopes of gain. This paper will attempt a more integrated conception of the etiology of encounter group casualties, with a central explanatory concept being the mismanagement of conflict. The second purpose is to replicate the Lieberman et al. (1973) study of encounter group casualties. Procedure for diagnosing injury was essentially the same, the type of encounter group somewhat different, and the incidence of psychological injury considerably lower.

Business schools across the country have demonstrated an increasing interest in teaching management skills in undergraduate and graduate programs. This article describes four models for skills courses based on existing courses. It includes for each course (a) an overview, (b) a statement of philosophy and pedagogy, (c) unique features, and (d) facilitator and student responses. The four models are then discussed as a group, and issues related to skill learning are raised.