Management educators are becoming increasingly interested in preparing their students for managerial and leadership roles in the job market, and soft skills have been touted as useful in this transition. Nevertheless, soft skills in public universities are difficult to develop in large class sizes, making co-curricular skills development training a good alternative. This paper is an instructional innovation piece that reports on the results of experimenting with different combined incentive and monitoring structures to understand their role in improving student engagement in a design thinking course aimed at developing soft skills in the extra-curricular setting. In this study, we analyzed quantitative and qualitative data from administrative records and interviews using descriptive, t-test and thematic analysis techniques to understand the effect of the combined mechanisms on engagement. Our findings indicate a significant difference between the control and treatment groups with regard to all engagement variables except for efforts to work harder. However, the mechanisms are more important in promoting behavioural engagement than cognitive and affective engagement. We recommend that management educators tailor incentives to specific engagement variables that drive desired outcomes rather than tying them to programme-level outcomes. Additionally, we suggest a need to understand the communication culture of students to shape decisions regarding monitoring mechanisms. © 2024, Centre for Behaviour and Wellness Advocacy. All rights reserved.
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