| Abstract: | This paper reports an empirical investigation of business gaming in education and research. Subjects were approximately 200 junior and senior undergraduate students who were assigned to seven-man teams on the basis of scores on the Least Preferred Co-worker (LPC) leadership style questionnaire, and who played the Marksim business game during one academic semester. Relationships were explored between post-game perceptions of the game, team atmosphere and the leader, combinations of congruent and incongruent leadership styles, and measures of team performance. Also explored were relationships between several predictor variables (including grade point average) and measures of team performance. The results were generally disappointing in regard to business gaming as an educational tool. However, it seems that business gaming may hold promise for laboratory research in the behavioral sciences. The results of this investigation suggest that relationship-oriented and task-oriented leadership styles and combinations of these styles within hierarchically structured groups affect members' perceptions of the task and other aspects of the task environment but do not affect group performance, at least directly. These results may have significance for those interested in organizational design and the selection and development of leaders for first and second-level managerial positions. |
