Transformation Capabilities in a Well-being Perspective: Dialogue Cards for Training Constructive Collaboration and Resilience in Groups

Business schools and universities have witnessed a rapid increase in stress and well-being challenges among their students, impacting learning negatively and causing student dropouts. To provide an understanding of this new reality, we draw on results from an ongoing research project on student well-being and present three main challenges: pressure from challenges in teamwork; insecurities deriving from feeling inadequate; and difficulties in being new to university. The challenges call for new methods to address student well-being, but furthermore reveal a need for training certain transformation capabilities in contemporary business education. Advocating a relational approach, we explore how fear of failure and speaking up about insecurities stresses the need for addressing psychological safety among students and training capabilities for constructive collaboration and resilience in groups. Dialogue cards are presented as a method to train those capabilities, along with a set of instructor guidelines for their implementation.