The Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education

MBA Students and Corporate Citizenship:

Incorporating Industry-Specific Service-Learning Projects into the Curriculum

Amy Kenworthy-U’Ren  

3205 Business School 

Bond University 

University Drive

Robina, Queensland  4229

Australia

Phone: 011-61-7-5595-2241

Fax: 011-61-7-5595-1160

Teaching Brief

The purpose of this teaching brief is to describe the integration of service-learning and corporate citizenship in a MBA-level course.  In the context of this course, the term ‘corporate citizenship’ is used to refer to relationships between businesses and non-profit organizations.  The term “service-learning” represents a teaching tool whereby students use course-based concepts to learn about and actively address social issues in their local communities.

            The course, called Managerial Skills and Perspectives (MSP), was designed in the late 1990s as a practical course through which full-time MBA students gain hands-on experience in select managerial areas.  This year, with the introduction of the corporate citizenship module, the course had three main topic areas: (1) self-management, (2) teambuilding, and (3) corporate citizenship.  Corporate citizenship was the third and final component of the course, building off of the learning that took place in the self-management and teambuilding sections, and is the focus of this paper.

            In the corporate citizenship component, the students had three required tasks: (1) attend a panel presentation on community partnering, (2) read and debrief relevant articles and books, and (3) research, design, and facilitate industry-specific corporate/community projects.  An overview of the corporate citizenship module, as described in the course syllabus, can be seen in Appendix A. 

            The first part of the module was a corporate/community partnership panel.  The purpose of the panel was to expose students to the goals, potential benefits, and challenges of developing connections between business and community organizations.  The panel included two managers from non-profit organizations and two senior executives from businesses, representing three different geographic regions in Australia.  The panelists were selected based on recent media attention to their partnership projects and were contacted directly by phone.  When talking with the prospective panelists, I explained the goals of the corporate citizenship module, described the audience (MBA students from 16 countries), and asked them if they would be willing to participate.  The four panelists listed below were the first people contacted; they each agreed to participate within 24 hours of my initial contact. 

1.      Bruce Thomson: CEO, Thomson Finance Corporation (Melbourne Australia).

2.      Simon Fraser: Customer Team Leader, Procter & Gamble (Sydney, Australia).

3.      Leigh Cleave: Community Support Manager, Royal Children’s Hospital Foundation (Brisbane, Australia).

4.      David Childs: State Fundraising Manager, Australian Red Cross, Queensland Chapter (Gold Coast, Australia).

The diversity of the panelists’ organizations was intentional.  The non-profit managers represented one local organization and one national organization.  The business panelists came from different industries, one representing a large multi-national consumer products organization and the other a small Australian organization in the finance industry.  They were each sent an overview of what should be included in their presentations (see Appendix B) and were not paid for their time.

Following the panel presentation, a question and answer period, and a student/panelist social hour, the MBA students and the organization representatives felt that the evening had been a success.  As Jacky Chao, a MBA student from Taiwan reflected: “The panel helped me to understand more about how businesses relate to the community. It also helped me to understand the importance of business links within society.”  George Lee, a MBA student from Singapore, said: “The panelists were insightful, knowledgeable and in tune with today’s business environment. It felt good to know that corporate Australia is doing positive things to better society.”

David Childs, from the Australian Red Cross, said that the Bond University initiative was innovative. “I was most impressed by the students’ interest and questions, and particularly, the understanding of the Australian business context by the international students.”  Simon Fraser, Procter & Gamble’s representative, believed that the session raised student awareness and challenged students’ thinking on how to create mutually beneficial partnerships between business and community organizations. “I believe the session worked well because it provided a practical frame of reference that students will be able to draw upon later,” he said.

            In the second part of the corporate citizenship module, the MBA students were required to read and discuss three articles on the topic and were given a reading list for their project reports.  This gave the students an overview of current discourse in the area, providing an academic foundation for their research-based practical projects.  An updated selection of articles and books relevant to this topic is listed in Appendix C.   

In the third and final part of the course module, the MBA students grouped themselves into industry-specific teams (e.g., finance, marketing, entertainment, information technology, manufacturing).  Each industry-specific team was assigned the task of researching corporate citizenship activities for four businesses in their respective industry.  The students had full autonomy selecting the businesses they worked with.  They were responsible for identifying, contacting, and reporting back to the businesses.    Once the students identified their companies (typically through searches of annual reports, newspapers, Australian journals, and the world wide web), they then used their company contacts to identify non-profit organization ‘partners’ in the local area.  After interviewing the corporate and non-profit organization contacts, the students used their respondents’ feedback as well as industry-specific research to create a list of current corporate citizenship practices in their industry, tips for effective corporate-community partnering, and recommendations for the partnerships they researched.  A sample list of tips, taken from the finance team’s final report, is as follows:

(1)   focus on mutual benefit - it is important that business and community organizations benefit equally from the relationship and that requires continued discussion and active involvement from both sides,

(2)   select small organizations and exchange posters, banners, etc. to publicly acknowledge the partnership,

(3)   choose strong partners in the community (i.e., well-run non-profit organizations with managers who are focused on quality and innovation), and

(4)   ensure that both parties invest resources in the partnership to encourage continued commitment. 

An example of a specific recommendation made by the finance team is related to the partnership between Deloitte PBS (a division of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu) and Earthwatch Australia (an organization that promotes sustainable conservation of the world’s natural and cultural heritage).  The team recommended, “Rather than promoting Earthwatch only vis-à-vis customers and shareholders, we suggest that a promotional strategy could also include a business-to-business perspective.  By promoting the partnership on their web pages and including their logo on letters (e.g., “a proud sponsor of Earthwatch”), this would increase Deloitte’s image as being socially responsible, globally-minded, and modern not only among the public, but also among other companies, which could have both positive economic and promotional effects.  From Earthwatch’s side, this may also increase the likelihood that they receive future corporate sponsors from Deloitte’s business-to-business communications.”  The industry-specific final reports and recommendations were distributed to all of the involved businesses and community organizations.

While the students were compiling research, they were simultaneously organizing corporate citizenship events.  The only stipulation for the events was that they had to be relevant to the students’ selected industries.  The students worked for approximately six weeks organizing their events.  I met with each group every two weeks to discuss their progress.

The events took place on the same day, with the day officially called the “Bond MBA Community Partner Day.”  To raise student commitment and public awareness of the project, student teams were charged with the task of designing a logo to represent the day’s activities.  The resultant logo, an amalgamation of the student teams’ designs, was printed on t-shirts and distributed to all participating students, organization representatives, and University members.  The logo consisted of two stick figures (representing businesses and community organizations, respectively) standing together supporting a globe above their heads.  The MBA students wanted the logo to elicit a sense of global community, with a number of students describing the globe as representative of their future commitment to corporate citizenship when they return, post-graduation, to their home countries.

The final projects included events such as a fundraiser for the Australian Red Cross (banking team), a program on international awareness for local school children (education team), a renovation of a local homeless shelter for teenagers (finance team), a “University Day” for homeless teenagers (marketing team), and a fundraiser for a national suicide prevention hotline involving a number of local celebrities (entertainment team).  I attended all of the events, as did a number of the local business and non-profit organization representatives contacted by the students during the industry research portion of the project. 

For the purposes of grading the projects, I defined success in the following ways: (1) a comprehensive research report (described in Appendix A and grounded in research from Appendix C as well as industry-specific sources) with easily understood and readily applicable tips for businesses and non-profit organizations, (2) a well-planned event resulting in a positive and measurable outcome for the community, and (3) a set of verifiable connections made between business and non-profit organizations in the local community (for many of the groups this was demonstrated through the involvement of business and non-profit organization representatives in their event). 

An example of the work required for a successful project can be seen in the marketing team’s “University Day.”  The students had to research the community issues typically targeted by marketing institutions for partnerships (children’s issues and education were consistently identified across large and small marketing organizations), contact local organizations to meet with and discuss partnering activities (six organizations were contacted, five participated as respondents, and two participated in the event), identify and meet with non-profit organization representatives who had worked with marketing businesses in partnership activities (four organizations participated), find an organization they wanted to run their event through (i.e., an organization with needs the students could meet [in this case one of the non-profit organizations they contacted for information was a homeless shelter with a large number of new teenage residents who needed to spend time in a ‘educational yet fun’ outdoor activity] and a high-level staff member who had committed to helping the students develop their project [in this case the Project Manager for the entire region’s shelter system]), meet with the shelter’s project manager to design a University Day for the teens, seek approvals and liability coverage for the teens to spend the day at the University (this involved meetings with the University’s security department, fitness center, conference center, public relations director, and the Business School’s administrative officer), contact local businesses to secure donations (four businesses donated food, two donated materials, and one donated awards for competitions), and organize transport and licensed coverage through the shelter system (the on-site shelter manager attended University Day and the shelter’s bus had liability coverage).  In the end, 8 teenagers, 10 MBA students, 4 student volunteers, 2 local business people, 2 university staff members, and 1 shelter supervisor participated in the event.  When summarizing the event, one of the MBA students wrote, “Everyone involved is rewarded for their participation in programs that help the community.  The companies benefit from the improvement of their image as well as the boost of morale and team membership of staff.  The community that they are supporting benefits greatly.  Perhaps most of all the participants themselves benefit because it simply feels good to do something to help others.”   

            Regarding resources, the overall cost of the corporate citizenship module was AUD$2,500.00; roughly half of the funding came from the Business School and the other half from a grant awarded by the Academy Fellows Partners Service-Learning program (see www.naspaa.org/awards for more information).  Costs included round-trip domestic plane fares for two of the panelists, the cost of a reception for 90 people, and printing costs for 75 “Bond MBA Community Partner Day” t-shirts.  No money was allocated to the students to assist with project development - if money was needed for their event, they had to recruit and involve industry-specific sponsor organizations.

  In the end, the corporate citizenship project was deemed successful by all of the involved constituents.  As a result of the project’s success, the management department in Bond University’s School of Business has made a commitment to continued integration of service-learning into the undergraduate and graduate curricula.  Our long-term program goals are to reinforce and expand University ties with the local community, encourage student reflection on corporate-community partnering, and continue to facilitate teambuilding and self-management through course-based, community-oriented, experiential projects for our MBA students.

APPENDIX A

CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP GROUP PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Corporate citizenship is a very important part of the business environment.  To kick off this topic, we have a panel presentation.  We have two representatives from the business sector and two representatives from the non-profit sector coming to Bond to talk about this issue with you.  This is the first time that panelists of such caliber and diversity have come to Bond to discuss this topic.  As such, the evening will include the panel presentation, a question and answer session, and a reception for everyone following the presentation.  This session is required.

Following the panel presentation you will begin to work on a “practical” industry report and corporate citizenship day.  You will each be grouped into teams of 6-8 students.  Teams will be based on your preferred industry (i.e., the industry you are interested in entering upon graduation).  Each team will be required to do the following:

(1) Research existing corporate-community partnerships in your selected industry.  The identified partnerships must represent at least two medium/large and two small businesses in the industry – totaling a minimum of four researched partnerships.  In your report, your team is asked to describe the partnership from the perspective of the corporation as well as from the perspective of the community organization (e.g., examining the benefits, logistics, challenges, needs).  You are also required to creatively design ways to improve each partnership (at least two ideas per partnership).  You should present each of your suggestions, as well as a summary sheet of your overall findings, to each of the partnerships you work with.  It is hoped that this type of “sharing” of partnership information will not only heighten your awareness of, and capabilities related to developing, successful partnerships but also be helpful to the industry-specific community partner organizations you investigate.  Reports should be double-spaced, 12-point, Times New Roman font, and between 8-10 pages in length. 

(2) Design a corporate-community partner event.  The event logistics will be discussed in more detail in our sessions.  The overall requirement is that your team design, organize, oversee, and participate in a community service event.  I encourage you to involve the organizations you are working with in this event.  The events are to be held on Saturday, March 24 between 8:00am and 1:00pm.  This day will be called the 2001 Bond MBA Community Partner Day.  A summary sheet describing your event should be attached to your report. 

APPENDIX B

OUTLINE & LOGISTICS FOR PRESENTATIONS

In your 20 minute presentation, please try to discuss the following points:

(1)   A bit about you and your organization (background information, mission statement, number of people served, history of your organization in Australia).

(2)   Information about your business/community organization partnerships – this should include (listed in no particular order):

a.      the businesses/community organizations you are working with as partners,

b.      how working with your respective partners helps your organization and how it fits into your mission,

c.      the history of your partnerships,

d.      the outcomes associated with your partnerships,

e.      any obstacles your organization has faced with its partnerships, and

f.        a bit about what you think your organization has received from the partnership (this may include concrete/tangible outcomes as well as social or interpersonal outcomes).

APPENDIX C

LIST OF RESOURCES FOR PROJECT DEVELOPMENT

AUTHOR’S VITA

Amy Kenworthy-U’Ren is an Assistant Professor of Management at Bond University in Queensland, Australia.  Her Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior is from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  One of her primary research areas relates to the application of, and outcomes associated with, service-learning as a pedagogical tool in undergraduate and graduate business programs.  In 2001, she was named an Academy of Management Service-Learning Fellow.  {For more information about service-learning, visit Campus Compact’s website at: www.compact.org/service-learning).