Using mind maps to study how business school students and faculty organize and apply general business knowledge

•We used mind maps to study how business school students and faculty apply knowledge.•Undergraduate business students organized knowledge by business discipline.•MBA students focused on strategic management at the expense of other disciplines.•Undergraduate and MBA students had shallow knowledge bases.•Faculty demonstrated integrative thinking and deep knowledge bases.

Concerns have been raised that business school pedagogy has limited students' intellectual development with respect to integrative thinking, synthetic reasoning and the ability analyze complex problems. Mind maps were used in this study to explore these concerns. Specifically, undergraduate and MBA students, and business school faculty performed a mind mapping exercise for a complex, multifaceted problem. Results supported concerns about students' intellectual development. Mind maps indicated that advanced undergraduate and advanced MBA students partitioned knowledge into distinct silos and that their knowledge bases were thin. In contrast, business school faculty developed rich mind maps characterized by dense connections among concepts. Implications of these findings for business school pedagogy were discussed.