Convergent Effects of Teaching on the Managers’ Way of Thinking and Decision-making in Operations Management
We conducted an exploratory study to examine whether teachincan significantly impact the managers’ way of thinking and, thus, their decision-making in operations management. To prove the proposition, we looked at whether learning operations management in the same class makes the students’ perspectives on operations become similar, i.e., converge, with each other’s. We collected data by surveying 29 managers in an EMBA program, who took an operations management course in the same class for 16 weeks. The survey was designed such that each question does not require the students to have any ‘preceding knowledge or experience’ in operations management. That is, each question measures the manager’s perspective rather than specialized knowledge about operations. Comparing the students’ answers to the survey questions on the first and the last day of the course, we have confirmed our hypothesis that classroom teaching makes the students converge in terms of their way of thinking and decision making in operations management. It implies that classroom teaching does have a significant impact on the way students make decisions on operations