COURSE OVERVIEW AND OBJECTIVES

We spend most of our time interacting with, working for, and living in organizations. This course aims to enhance your understanding and management of human behavior in organizations (OB). We explore behavioral, managerial, and structural influences that affect organizational effectiveness, productivity, and efficiency. We investigate –

individual behavior, including perception and decision making,
interpersonal behavior, including leadership, teamwork, and communication, and
organizational issues such as job design, organizational design, culture, and strategy.

This course integrates conceptual knowledge about managing people in organizations with opportunities to develop practical managerial skills. Videos illustrate course concepts, as do case analyses where you apply course ideas to problematic situations in real-world organizations. Teamwork in the course lets you practice and evaluate your effectiveness at managing, problem solving, and working in teams. The team presentations inject a bit of competition.

The course complicates your views of organizations by interrelating ideas, while pointing out the shadings and the many factors that affect human behavior in organizations. By the end of the course, you will better understand organizational behavior, and will have gained some ideas about resolving the problematic situations that organizations and managers face.

The experiences of past students suggest that this course has a good chance of becoming the most valuable course you will take as an MBA student. MBA students who are managing no one and do not expect to manage anyone for a few years often doubt the value of studying organizational behavior. However, when US business schools have surveyed alumni who graduated ten years or more earlier, the consistent response has been that OB turned out to be the most valuable course they took. Since business alumni from different universities have responded similarly, one has to attribute the evaluations to the basic content rather than to specific teachers or specific curricula. The reason, of course, is that managers do not work alone. Effective managing requires getting results with and through other people. Of course, some of these benefits take time to develop. Many new MBAs have little managerial responsibility and it is not until they have been working for several years that they need managerial expertise.

Case Analysis

Case analysis helps you sharpen your analytic, problem-solving, and decision-making skills. It also lets you apply OB concepts to real organizational issues.

When analyzing a case, remember that there are many possible solutions. The goal is not to find the optimal or sole solution. There may not be one. Of course, some solutions turn out to be effective and others ineffective or harmful, but people usually have to implement solutions in order to find out what results they produce. A good idea may turn into a bad idea if it is implemented poorly, and shrewd implementation can salvage a bad idea.

A course should not (and cannot) simulate real life. Rather, it should provide you with learning experiences. So just explore the cases and practice analyzing and solving real problems from an OB perspective.

Teams

Teams play central roles in this course because teams play central roles in organizations. In organizations, most people spend most of their time working in, interacting with, and managing teams. The use of teams has been increasing rapidly in recent years. One goal of this course is to give you opportunities to practice and evaluate your effectiveness at managing, problem-solving, and working in teams. Together with a few other students, you will try to build an effective team. These experiences will help you to understand teams and to work more effectively within them.

Sebastian and I recognize that part-time students find it difficult to get together to work on joint projects, but it just is not realistic to omit teamwork from an MBA program. Therefore, we are trying to make team meetings and communications as convenient as possible. Sebastian will help you assemble teams that link people who will be able to meet at the same times and who offer each other diverse expertise. Each team will have a group e-mail address: By sending a message to this address, you will be able to send it to everyone on your team.

Over half of your grade will come from team activities, and you will spend a good deal of time working on team activities. So you need to devote some effort to forming an effective team. This partly involves putting together people who have different skills or knowledge. It also requires some serious team-building efforts during the course.

An Important General Observation

At various times, people state generalizations about differences between ethnic groups, differences between types of organizations, differences between the outcomes of strategies, differences between people’s responses to various stimuli. These generalizations often (indeed, almost always) have weak foundations and the differences are almost always only small fractions of the variations in behavior. Consider, for example, the generalization that males are taller than females. As a statement about heights averaged across all humans, this generalization is certainly true. But there are many males who are shorter than the average female and there are many females who are taller than the average male. There are even subcultures in which the average male is shorter than the average female. So knowing the generalization tells one nothing useful about the comparative heights of two specific people.

The graph below shows two statistical distributions that have different means. The average value of the lavender variable is greater than the average value of the turquoise variable. However, such a comparison may create a misimpression that the lavender variable is almost always greater than the turquoise one. With some statistical distributions, it could even happen that the lavender variable exceeds the turquoise one much less than half of the time.

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