Abstract

Games designed for teaching can also be used as diagnostic devices to spot weaknesses in the organization chart and as potent research tools into the dynamics of group behavior. The complex CIT Management Game was played over most of the 1959-60 academic year by six teams of graduate students at authors' Graduate School of Industrial Administration. During that year authors were able to collect data that bear both upon problems of education for management and on questions of social research. This paper reports authors' finding, first, on educational aspects of the game and second, on the implications of their data for some current issues in organizational research. Management games are usually used primarily as educational devices. They can also be used as research devices, either contemporaneously with their educational use or as an independent mechanism, which opens up possibilities for further experiments. According to authors' they were able to investigate relationships between game performance and (1) individual ability; (2) personality variables; (3) dispersion of power within teams; and (4) consonance of perceptions of influence within teams.