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Course Introduction This course provides students with a basic understanding of how organizations work. Topics covered include organizational structure, new organizational forms, organizational culture, motivation, the employment contract, diversity, negotiation, communication, leadership and working in teams. After taking this course, students should have an appreciation for the way in which these organizational elements interrelate and work together to maintain a functioning organization. This understanding should help students to approach their careers in a more strategic way.Because teams are so important in organizations today, an essential part of this course is to provide students with hands-on experience working in teams. Employers say this is a crucial job skill that they are actively looking for in new hires. The course uses an innovative system of permanent teams that compete for bonus points to give students the opportunity to practice team skills and reflect on team processes. The course structure also provides valuable opportunities for students to practice leadership and negotiation skills -- all in a context in which mistakes do not have far-reaching consequences. There was a time when it was thought that scholars were close to knowing everything we needed to know about how to design and run the optimal organization. Bureaucracy was best. It seemed that only the details remained to be worked out: what was the ideal mix of salary and commission; how many employees should there be for each manager; how bright should the lights be in the workplace, and so on. This smug complacency was shattered thirty years ago by a series of studies showing that there is, in fact, no one best way to organize. Different environments place differing requirements on organizations. An organization designed to thrive in a stable, well-understood environment, for example, cannot be expected to do as well in conditions of uncertainty and rapid change. A theory of relativity for organizational behavior was needed, and contingency theory was born. Scholars began to search for the two or three key elements of the environment that determined which type of organization was most appropriate in a given setting. In the next two decades, they found not two or three but two or three thousand such contingencies. It has become increasingly clear that the best way to organize in a particular situation depends on so many factors - elements of strategy, industry, market, history, culture, people, technology – that we will never find a recipe for the ideal organization and there will never be a grand unified theory of organizational behavior. It is now clear that building and sustaining quality organizations will always require the analytical skills, judgment, intuition, and especially the creativity of human leaders and managers. The ability to act with skill and creativity in organizations begins with the development of multiple perspectives on organizations. As you are no doubt aware, humans habitually settle into fixed perspectives, unchallenged mental models of how the world works, unconscious filters of what we pay attention to and what we ignore. These habits offer powerful economies of thought: without them, the simplest task of picking a face out in a crowd or listening to the radio while driving would be impossible. But they impose costs as well. They lock us into a single view of the world that may not be best, that is surely incomplete, that will become outdated, and that is resistant to change. Creativity involves trading off economy of thought for innovation of thought. It requires the discipline of interpreting what we see and hear in organizations from multiple standpoints. As a starting point, this course is organized around three different perspectives on organizations: the strategic design perspective, the political perspective, and the cultural perspective. Each of them offers a different angle on what an organization is, and each offers different tools for action. Accordingly, we will probe some of the social and psychological processes that make it likely that managers will fall into unchallenged patterns of action and thought. We will then turn to a more in-depth treatment of the strategic design, and political and cultural perspectives on organization. While leading and managing others always presents challenges, our goal in this course is to use the three perspectives to develop a more complete understanding of these challenges, so as to enable organizational participants to best address these challenges. |
