Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education Volume 2 Number 2 Fall 2004 Printed in the U.S.A. TEACHING BRIEF So What Does Dance Have to Do with It? Using Dance to Teach Students about Leadership * Tim O. Peterson † Department of Management, Oklahoma State University, 700 N. Greenwood Avenue, Tulsa, OK 74106-0700, e-mail: top@okstate.edu Joann K. Williams Department of Management, Marketing and Information Management/E-Commerce, Jacksonville State University, 700 Pelham Road South, Jacksonville, AL 36265-1602, e-mail: williamsj@jsucc.jsu.edu ABSTRACT Dance is a common metaphor in both the change and leadership literature. However, can dance, a movement art, actually be used to learn about leadership? The answer is yes and this exercise shows you how. Dance as an instructional strategy allows the instructor to tap the cognitive, affective, and conative components of the brain. Subject Areas: Dance, Instruction Method, Leadership, and Performing Art. INTRODUCTION The organizational literature has seen a number of books published with the word dance in the title. For example, a few of these books are: Belasco’s (1990) book entitled Teaching the Elephant to Dance: Empowering Change in Your Organi- zation and Gerstner’s (2002) book entitled Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Inside IBM’s Historic Turnaround. Then there is the book by the learning orga- nization associates (Senge et al., 1999) called The Dance of Change: The Chal- lenge to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations. At a recent conference, we found a new book entitled When Opposites Dance: Balancing the Manager and Leader Within (Williams & Deal, 2003). It appears that organizational writ- ers like the metaphor of dancing as an organizing method to explain organiza- tional change and leadership. However, can dance really be used to teach students about leadership? This exercise was developed to show that the metaphor of dance can be used to teach students about leadership. Nissley (2002) posits that arts- based learning is an excellent supplement to the more traditional instructional ∗ The authors appreciate the helpful comments made by Claudette M. Peterson on earlier drafts of this paper. † Corresponding author. 193