Laura Graves
Associate
Professor of Management
 "People now have broader roles in the workplace than ever before. By providing an understanding of the big picture in an organization, an MBA degree enables you to move beyond strictly technical skills so that you can take on a variety of roles. An MBA also prepares you to be an effective member of a team, which is a valuable skill in today’s workplace."
Active Learning in the MBA Classroom. "Sometimes there’s a lot of moaning and laughing in my classroom," says Laura Graves with a smile, as she describes the times when her students are involved in group activities such as role-playing, simulation exercises, and case discussions. Graves calls herself an experiential teacher. "I believe that the best learning occurs when students are really involved, so I rely heavily on active learning. For example, in one of my classes we recently did the desert survival simulation. In this exercise, the students make decisions as a group much as they would in the workplace. By analyzing how they work as individuals and as group members, and by giving one another feedback, students gain valuable insights about what it takes to be effective leaders and team members. These are all skills that will serve them well in their careers."
Small Classes Allow for Greater Interaction.
For Graves, the small size of the Clark GSOM is a tremendous asset, because it allows her to get to know her students and creates the kind of informality in the classroom that is key to her teaching style. "With a class of 20, I can call students by name, have conversations with them in the hallway, and generally get to know them in a way that would be impossible if we had classes of 60 to 100 students." Clark’s small classes are especially beneficial for the GSOM students for whom English is a second language, because they feel more comfortable speaking up than they would in a large group.
Before joining the faculty at Clark, Laura Graves was a management consultant for Aetna, one of the giants of the insurance industry. There, she developed procedures for the International Insurance Division, a group with subsidiaries all over the world, to help managers select the most qualified people for assignments in the company‘s overseas offices.
Her experiences at Aetna in the areas of employee selection, diversity, and cross-cultural issues have influenced a number of her current activities. One of her research interests is employee selection processes in organizations. "The goal of that research is to help organizations improve the quality of their hiring decisions so they can reduce turnover and improve productivity. A lot of my work focuses on ways to reduce bias in the selection process. There are many types of bias gender bias, attractiveness bias, similarity bias, etc. And when hiring managers define precise selection criteria and develop structured interview questions, this represents a giant step toward improved decision-making." Graves, whose other major research interest is diversity, teaches a course on Managing Diversity in the Workplace, and is currently program chair of the division on gender and diversity of the Academy of Management, a professional organization of several thousand professors of management.
Her background in cross-cultural relations provides many anecdotes for her
Leading Teams and Organizations course, in which she deals with careers in today’s global economy and the issues involved in undertaking an overseas assignment. "l give my students examples from my days at Aetna to try to provide them with the skills they will need if they’re going to work for a multi-national corporation."
Global Perspective. Graves feels that the international composition of the GSOM is a real boon to future business leaders. "The fact that our students hail from a variety of countries and bring their home cultures and management practices with them has a major impact on what happens in the classroom. For example, if we’re talking about performance appraisals, we can compare U.S. practices to those in countries where they are much less formalized than they are here. And, in a more general way, I think it is crucial for MBA students to be part of a program with the diversity and international emphasis of ours."
According to Graves, another valuable asset of the Clark GSOM is the faculty, who earn high marks from her because they are both scholars and teachers. "Most schools of management are either teaching institutions, there faculty focus primarily on teaching, or research institutions, where they focus primarily on research. But at the GSOM, we have people who are fine scholars in their disciplines, who also put a lot of time and effort into their work in the classroom. As a result, they all deliver a quality product to their students. This combination of excellence in faculty scholarship and teaching is very important to me and reflects one of the core values of Clark University."
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