Towards an SNA-Based Framework for Educating Future Global Leaders

This paper investigates social network analysis as a method to assess the performance of a community-based learning process for educating future global leaders. Our framework is based on a distributed course for optimizing online communication behavior through social network analysis, which has been taught repeatedly to business (administration?), information systems and MBA students. These students come from geographically distant universities with different languages and cultures. They never meet face to face, but form virtual interdisciplinary teams collaborating on a common task. The course teaches three goals: (1) Students become more innovative by experiencing the power of “swarm creativity”. They form a collaborative innovation network (COIN) to engage in trusting and focused-collaboration in cyberteams to reach a shared goal. (2) Students improve communication skills in a virtual world by learning to make better use of electronic communication channels such as chat, skype, e-mail, wiki, and web-conferencing. (3) Students become better collaborators across different cultures and geographies by working together with peers from other countries and other mother tongues. Our study permitted us to obtain preliminary results on correlating temporal online communication patterns with team performance by collecting interaction data from e-mail, skype, web-conferencing, and face-to-face meetings. Performance is measured by correlating traditional network performance metrics such as betweenness and density, achievement of the course objectives through peer evaluation, and development of leadership personality characteristics. Our final goal is the development of guidelines to assess a learning organization focused on managerial competencies development.