Emma Stenström

In this paper, we advance the conversation about management education by outlining a future scenario of management teaching in which art is employed as a method, learning goal, and methodology. The scenario is informed by our personal experiences of teaching management and art expressed in terms of three design principles for management education: the principles of body, mind, and soul; and it is presented as an ethnography from the future. This future is envisioned to be characterized by four assumptions: that students are co-creators of knowledge; that the role of teachers is to facilitate the students’ learning processes; that Artificial Intelligence is an integral part of learning processes; and that the primary learning objective for the students is to develop their relations to the world and contribute with feasible future solutions to wicked problems and global challenges. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as TaylorXX1Francis Group.

Stress and mental ill-health carry considerable costs for both individuals and organizations. Although interventions targeting compassion and self-compassion have been shown to reduce stress and benefit mental health, related research in organizational settings is limited. We investigated the effects of a 6-week psychological intervention utilizing compassion training on stress, mental health, and self-compassion. Forty-nine employees of two organizations were randomly assigned to either the intervention (n = 25) or a physical exercise control condition (n = 24). Multilevel growth models showed that stress (p = 0.04) and mental ill-health (p = 0.02) decreased over 3 months in both groups (pre-intervention to follow-up: Cohen's d = -0.46 and d = 0.33, respectively), while self-compassion only increased in the intervention group (p = 0.03, between group d = 0.53). There were no significant effects on life satisfaction in any of the groups (p > 0.53). The findings show promising results regarding the ability of compassion training within organizations to decrease stress and mental ill-health and increase self-compassion.

In this article Emma Stenström introduces a concrete method, bubble-hopping, to avoid polarization. Having tested the methods on over 400 undergraduate and graduate students at the Stockholm School of Economics, Stenström shows how bubble-hopping creates new perspectives and improves students’ empathy. By emphasizing how “good questions need to be responded by good listening”, bubble-hopping can provide an easy to use method for organizations that wants to create a healthy working environment.

In Activity Based Working Environment (ABWE) offices, employees are allowed increased autonomy and are expected to choose where, when, with whom, and to some degree with what, to work; in other words, employees are expected to self-lead to a higher degree and to coordinate and align with colleagues. Effects of these expectations on employees’ cognitive stress and performance are understudied. In the present study, Swedish ABWE workers (N = 416) are compared with workers in cell offices (N = 30) and landscape offices (N = 64), and relationships of self-leadership, information richness, and autonomy with cognitive stress and performance were examined using regression analysis. Results show no relationship between office type and outcomes. For cognitive stress, information richness had the largest negative relationship, followed by self-leadership: goal-setting and autonomy. For performance, self-leadership: goal-setting had the largest positive relationship, followed by information richness. This suggests that when organizational situations cannot be strongly structured – for example because the best work process is not known, or innovation or different collaboration constellations are needed – they need instead to be enriched so that employee orientation and coordination do not become too much of a burden on the individual employee, disrupting cognitive functioning and performance.

Artikeln beskriver hur en högskola vill bidra till att skapa hållbarhet, inte enbart genom forskning, utan också genom att reformera utbildningen. Studenterna vid Handelshögskolan i Stockholm får numera lära sig vilka globala utmaningar vi står inför och vilka riskerna är om vi inte gör något åt dem, men också vilka möjligheter det finns och hur de själva kan bidra till att nå de globala målen. Under de första fyra terminerna, får de, parallellt med andra kurser, läsa ett spår kallat ”Global Challenges”, varvid en termin ägnas åt mänsklig hållbarhet. Förutom att hålla själva, behöver de lära sig att skapa hållbara organisationer, men också att tänka i termer av meningsfullhet och att släppa sitt ego, till förmån för ekosystemet.

The case Bank of Aland: Meeting the Global Challenge of Oceans' follows the evolution of Bank of Aland and its work with sustainability over the last two decades, with a special emphasis on the company's social ambition that changed dramatically in the year 2015 as the bank wanted to tackle the global challenge: the issue of oceans'. The case discuss the development of the Baltic Sea Project Card, the associated open-source platform called Aland Index, and links it to the trend of FinTech companies and digitalization in the baking industry.