This course seeks to accomplish three primary objectives:
(1) introduce you to the basic principles and concepts of
organizational behavior,
(2) help you develop the skills to implement these principles 
in a way that benefits you and your organization, and
(3) help you gain a better understanding of yourself.

GROUP PROJECT & PRESENTATION

The group project consists of a research project designed to
answer one of two key questions:
(1) What causes someone to perform their job well?
or
(2) What causes someone to remain committed to their 
organization?

Your group will choose one of the two key questions to devote 
your project to (or you may be assigned a topic if the choices 
are not balanced). At the conclusion of the term, you will give 
a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation detailing the development 
and results of your research project. The research project has 
two phases. Target dates for completing these two phases are 
given in the Course Schedule. You will not turn in anything 
until the end of the term, but are strongly urged to keep pace 
with the target dates so that you do not fall behind.

Phase I: Theory and Hypotheses
In this first phase of the project, your group builds a theory
about what causes someone to have high or low levels of
performance or commitment (depending on which question your 
group is assigned). Your theory will be built from in-depth 
interviews of people (one interview per group member) who are 
as different from one another as possible. The specific 
questions will be left up to you but should explore the 
interview subjects’ beliefs about what fosters performance or 
commitment. Let them tell you what concepts are important! Do 
not provide a set of concepts for them! For example, one 
interview question might be “When you think about times that 
you have performed well, what factors contributed to that good 
performance?” or “When you think about employers that you were 
really committed to, why did you feel such high commitment 
levels?” Your projects can focus on the concepts discussed in 
the course, but should go beyond those concepts as well.

Once your interviews are completed, your group will distill the
most interesting themes from your interviews into specific
predictions that can be tested with data. Each project should
include exactly three hypotheses, phrased something like this:
“The amount of stress on the job will be negatively related to
organizational commitment.” Hypotheses can focus on the concepts
discussed in class, but should go beyond these concepts as well.
In the interest of diversity in presentations, your study can
devote only hypotheses to one of the following concepts: liking
of coworkers, pay, and advancement opportunities. These concepts
come up very often in interviews, but multiple presentations 
with the same hypotheses become redundant. Outside this 
limitation, feel free to focus on the concepts that interest 
you.

This section of your presentation should give the following 
details:
•	Detailed descriptions of your interview participants
•	Verbatim highlights of the questions asked in the 
interview
•	Verbatim highlights of the participants’ responses to 
the questions
•	Some themes that emerged from the interviews (supported 
using those verbatim highlights)
•	The theory that your project will test, expressed in 
diagram form (i.e., your three predictors in the boxes, with 
arrows flowing into your dependent variable)
•	Your three hypotheses, stated like the example above

Phase II: Data and Verification
Now that you’ve come up with your theory and hypotheses, it is
time to test them to see if they are supported with data. First
your group must come up with ways of measuring the concepts
contained in your hypotheses. Organizational research typically
involves several kinds of measures, including self-report scales
(where a “scale” is a collection of multiple survey items),
behavioral observation, and organizational records (e.g.,
performance appraisal forms, time card data, absenteeism rates,
productivity indices). For the sake of simplicity, your project
will use only self-reported scales. You should create a scale 
for each of the concepts in your hypotheses (hints for creating 
them will be given in class during the project help session). 
Your group will then administer your survey to 6 individuals 
(who are as different from one another as possible) per group 
member. You will devote a total of 4 items to each scale, in 
order to minimize the burden on the participants.
 
I will give you an Excel spreadsheet to enter your data into,
which will include formulas that will calculate the reliability
of your scales. This spreadsheet will also include formulas that
will correlate scores on your predictor measures with scores on 
your dependent variable measure. Your theory receives some 
verification if the correlations in your data confirm your 
hypotheses. If they do not, then your theory needs to be 
amended. Note that the support (or lack of support) of your 
predictions has no bearing on your grade. Research projects 
rarely turn out exactly the way we want them to.

This section of your presentation should give the following 
details:
•	The survey items used to measure each concept 
(including your dependent variables)
•	Detailed descriptions of your survey respondents
•	The reliability of all six of your scales
•	The correlations between your predictors and your 
dependent variables
•	The confidence intervals around those correlations
•	The statistical significance of those correlations
•	Whether the correlations support or refute your 
hypotheses
•	Whether the correlations seemed to vary across the three
outcome dimensions (i.e., affective/continuance/normative or
task/citizenship/counterproductive)
•	Some conceptual explanations for such variation – does 
the pattern make sense?
•	A list of very specific prescriptions for managers, 
based on your results

All students are responsible for maintaining the highest standards of 
honesty and integrity in every phase of their academic careers.  The
penalties for academic dishonesty are severe and ignorance is not an
acceptable defense.

Academic honesty means performing all academic work without plagiarizing,
cheating, lying, tampering, stealing, receiving assistance from any other
person or using any source of information that is not common knowledge.