Answering the Challenge: Developing the Management Action Skills of Business Students

Business schools are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that they can improve behavioral (action) as well as cognitive management skills in their students. A new genre of skills-based management texts is now on the market to assist instructors in this endeavor. Most of these new texts rely on an approach to skill development grounded in social learning theory (SLT). This study examines whether an SLT-based approach to management skill development is indeed superior to a more traditional experiential education (EE) approach. Results show that the SLT-based approach out-performed the EE approach on two of three learning criteria with no significant differences in student preferences between the two. These results suggest considerable promise for the current genre of textbooks for answering the action skills development challenge.