Course Description
The basic concepts, theories, and practices needed to understand human behavior within work organizations. Reviews the interpersonal skills that provide individual, group, and organizational effectiveness. In essence, it is an exploration of how, why, and what people, think, feel, and do in organizations. Students will apply this knowledge through a research project.
Athena Title
Organizational Behavior
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in MGMT 5920E, MGMT 5920S
Prerequisite
MGMT 3000 or MGMT 3000H or MGMT 3000E
Semester Course Offered
Offered every year.
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
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.
Topical Outline
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
Syllabus