MGMT 439: Organizational Behavior: Theory and Application
Rita Patel Thakur Office:
LAC 214
ONLINE
Ph:
(909)-593-3511 x 4206
E-Mail:
thakurr@ulv.edu
COURSE
OBJECTIVES:
People
work in relationships. On the job one deals with bosses, subordinates,
customers, and colleagues. How you
deal with them can make the difference between you – and them and enjoying the
job or hating it.
This
course will examine individual, group, and system behaviors in modern
organizations; change, leadership, motivation, work groups, innovation and
power. The values implicit in
management approaches and principles will also be considered.
During the semester you should:
1. Gain a deeper understanding of how you
and others interact in many organizational settings.
2. Practice recognizing complex situations
and deciding appropriate responses.
3. Explore moral dimensions and cultural
differences inherent in managerial issues.
Students who take
full advantage of the readings, assignments and discussions in this course
will:
· Gain an understanding of the nature of human
motivation, especially as this applies to workplace settings;
· Learn to apply various theories pertaining to
workplace dynamics to their own lives and the working conditions they
encounter;
· Become adept at identifying dysfunctional
organizational patterns;
· Be able to differentiate and appreciate the
usefulness of theoretic frameworks as tools for gaining insight into social processes.
· Become aware of the global forces shaping life on
the planet;
· Appreciate how cultural and ethnic differences shape
approaches to getting work done.
·
recognize the power
and communication complexities in a situation and decide appropriate responses.
·
recognize and
understand other people’s motivations and thinking patterns and decide
appropriate responses.
·
Develop an
understanding of underlying causes of conflict and identify potential
solutions.
REQUIRED
TEXT:
Moorhead, G. and Griffin,
R.W. (7th Ed.). (2004). Organizational behavior: Managing people
and organizations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
ACTIVITIES
OF PARTICIPANTS:
Active participation in classroom discussion and group
project is required to accomplish the objectives of this course. Failure to
participate in class discussion will have a severe negative effect on the final
grade.
The student will also
LEARNING METHODOLOGY AND COURSE ACTIVITIES
The
learning methodology used in this course consists of reading the textbook and
other assigned readings, lectures, discussion of current articles in the
business written media, individual participation in on-line class discussion,
and individual research papers. The assigned readings will be drawn from the
required text.
Other current articles are
posted by the instructor in the Resources section of Blackboard/. It is important to the
success of this class that all students read the material assigned for each
week. This will prepare the student for the on-line discussions.
Learning Climate: The approach that I plan to
use for this course takes the view that the instructor and students work in
a collaborative effort that recognizes the uniqueness of each person and encourages the
learning process. My underlying
assumptions are that individuals are interested in learning and are responsible
for their accomplishments. This means that you must assume responsibility
for learning and for the evaluation of that learning.
Class session: This course will be conducted
as a set of workshops. The role of the instructor in this environment will be:
·
To
establish a framework and put together a set of materials for exploration,
The role of the students
will be to participate, to do assignments, and to complete the research project.
POSTING YOUR DOCUMENTS:
This is an online course that utilizes the
courseware Blackboard and the email system. You will need a Blackboard account to participate in this
course. If you do not have one, please go to the ulv.edu website and
go to the Distance Education page and follow instructions to obtain a BB
account. You can then go to bb.ulv.edu
to access your course. If you have
any question(s), please email bbhelp@ulv.edu for assistance.
The discussion board is under the COMMUNICATION
section of the BB. I have set-up the DISCUSSION BOARD so that each week
you have a place to submit your assignments and discuss the questions asked by
the faculty or facilitators.
Please double click on the “Discussion Boards”. Click on the appropriate weekly
assignment you want to participate in.
Then click on “Add New Thread”.
You can present your input and discussion in this section.
ASSESSMENT
PLAN:
The final grade is determined and based on
the following assessment tools:
Discussion Board
Assignments
80 points
(4
points each) Please see the Discussion Board.
Class
Participation 20
points
(Please
see Appendix 1)
WRITING
STANDARDS
All writing assignments must be
word-processed and checked for spelling and grammar. The following are to be
taken into consideration by the student when writing the papers in this course:
Content:
Completed
all parts of assignment
Developed
thoughtfully with appropriate support for ideas
Synthesized
and evaluated appropriate materials
Original
and appropriate approach - clear thesis
Organization:
Logical
plan
Appropriate
order of ideas
Appropriate
beginning and conclusion
Appropriate
cohesion and progression of ideas and transitions
Form, Mechanics, Surface:
Correct
language control
No
grammatical or sentence errors
No
spelling, punctuation, and capitalization errors
Correct
idiom and word usage
ACADEMIC
HONESTY
Your attention is called to the section
of the University of La Verne Catalog entitled "Academic Honesty"
(pages 63 and 64 of 2004-2005 Catalog).
Any student found to be violating this section of the catalog will be given a
grade of ZERO for the assignment
in question. Repeat offenders (including other courses) will get an
"F" for this course. There is a "no tolerance" standard in
this course for academic dishonesty.
In order to avoid plagiarism,
even by mistake, please read and follow the steps described in Appendix 3.
CLASS SCHEDULE
Week
1 1/6/06 –
1/13/05
·
Introduction:
We
are going to be a team for the next ten weeks. More we know about each other, better we can communicate and
relate with each other. Keeping
that in mind please introduce yourself to your classmates on the Discussion
Board in the topic area labeled
“Week – 1, Introduction”
· Chapter 1
·
Discussion Board
Assignments 1(a) and 1(b)
Week
2 1/14/06
to 1/20/06
· Chapters 2 and 3
· Discussion Board Assignments 2(a) and 2(b)
Week
3 1/21/06 to 1/27/06
Week
4 1/28/06 to 2/3/06
Week
5 2/4/06 to
2/10/06
Week 6 2/11/06 to 2/17/06
Week 7 2/18/06 to2/24/06
Week 8 2/25/06 to 3/2/06
Week 9 3/3/06 to 3/3/9/06
Week 10 3/10/06 to 3/16/06
Appendix 1
CLASS PARTICIPATION
We
have total of 10 sessions. Class
participation is vital for the success of this course. All students are
expected to actively participate in all discussions. Please read all assigned material for the week in which we
discuss the topics before coming to the class. According to Vincent Ryan Ruggiero the following factors
generate good discussion:
1. Be prepared for discussion by
reflecting on what you know in advance, expanding your knowledge through
research and anticipating perspectives different from yours.
2. Be prepared to support your ideas
with evidence.
3. Please respect other participants
and their ideas with your willingness to listen and understand them and not
attacking other participants personally.
4. Please do contribute but do not
dominate.
5. Please aim for clarity, directness, and
economy of expression.
6. Listen actively by trying to enter the
speaker’s frame of mind.
7. Judge ideas responsibly through
thoughtful consideration of overall strengths and weaknesses of the ideas.
8. Resist the urge to interrupt other
participants.
Class
participation will be graded based on the following criteria:
Example of Good Class Participation in
Answering Discussion Questions
Yes, employers should be allowed to require drug
testing as a condition to offering employment. For public safety, in many
cases, employers should be mandated to conduct drug testing before
hiring as well as periodically test during teh course of employment.
Airline pilots, public transportation operators, military, physicians,
law enforcement personnel, product safety testers and school teachers are
a few examples of positions that should required initial and ongoing drug
testing. While I feel that certain jobs should have mandatory drug
testing, there are other industries where drug testing should be left to the
sole discretion of the employer. These would include positions where the
employee generally works alone or has minimal or no interaction directly with
the public (artists, computer programmers). To the extent that an
employer is offering a job, and thereby held to a standard of responsibility
for its employees, the employer should be able to establish it's own
requirements for employment so long as it lies within the guidelines of
employment law and general practices. Employers should reserve the
right to require drug testing provided that the policy and procedures for drug
testing is clearly conveyed to potential employees.
Additionally, any drug testing policy should carried out indiscriminately
across the board.
Example of Good Class Participation in
Contributing to the Class Discussion
What resolution would you come up with
to make the pay fair for CEO's and their employees?
While I think that Carol's cap factor is a
great and fair idea, one company implementing such a policy has little chance
of success. As Elizabeth commented, the forces of our capitalist
society will drive the competition for all things, including CEO's.
Companies willing to pay the biggest salaries will get the best
executives. Companies with salary cap factors will be hard pressed to
fill its CEO position unless it can offer other perks. Perhaps in
conjunction with a salary cap, a greater portion of CEO compensations should be
tied to company performance. Measurements for performances should include
a comprehensive set of metrics for short-term and long-term achievements, productivity
benchmarks, stock price valuation, etc. Stock prices should not be the
only measurement of a CEO's performance, as we've seen in the case of
Enron, AIG, WorldCom and many others, where creative accounting and
elusive schemes manipulated the raise stock prices while the actual company
value declined. With a larger part of their compensation tied to
the company's overall performance, CEO's would have a more vested interest in
the well-being of the company. By adding stock options and performance
bonuses to a set base salary, executives would more or less have to 'earn'
their pay. As evidenced in the video about John Chambers, to make the
compensation fairer, every employee in the organization should benefit
from improved performance of the company because every employee contributes in
some way. CEO's will still have a much higher payday than the employees,
but the system is more 'fair' in the sense that those who have a greater
impact on the organization are paid higher; and at the same time every
employee will receive a proportionate share from the increased company
performance.
Appendix
2
Short Paper Assignment
A problem well defined is a problem half-solved
Length: 4-6 pages,
double-spaced, Times New Roman 12-point font,
one inch margins.
For this assignment,
you will draw from selected theories from the text, Chapters 1-10, that help
explain work place dynamics that you are currently experiencing. The theories you choose are up to you. You may wish to focus on a particular
chapter, or draw from various chapters as you pursue some theme that makes
sense to you when considering your workplace. You may alternatively choose to examine past workplace
experiences if you wish, but I prefer you focus on your current situation.
In
completing this assignment, you will make reference to the text where
appropriate
POINTS WILL BE DEDUCTED FOR
INAPPROPRIATE CITATION FORMATTING.
Please see Appendix 4 to avoid problems with references.
Note: For most of us, workplace settings are
dysfunctional to varying degrees.
Critically assess the theories we’ve examined. You might think of these questions as a way of framing your
analysis:
·
Do you think they make
any difference in terms of helping organizations to function better?
·
What factors are
dominant in shaping your workplace setting/dynamics?
·
How much of what
happens or does not happen in organizations depends on management
(organizational culture that is created, informal power or lack of, competence,
etc.)?
Grading Criteria:
1.
Students clearly
specify the theories they apply, and provide clear and useful examples from
their workplace.
2.
Students demonstrate
effort to critically examine the usefulness of theories, and identify areas of
their experience that don’t conform neatly to any set of theories.
3.
Students demonstrate
effort to critically examine the usefulness of theories, and identify areas of
their experience that don’t conform neatly to any set of theories.
4.
Students
strive to construct hypotheses that help to order and make sense of the
processes they are observing.
The following objectives
for the course are tied to this assignment:
· Gain an understanding of the nature of human
motivation, especially as this applies to workplace settings;
· Learn to apply various theories pertaining to
workplace dynamics to their own lives and the working conditions they
encounter;
· Become adept at identifying dysfunctional
organizational patterns;
· Be able to differentiate and appreciate the
usefulness of theoretic frameworks as tools for gaining insight into social
processes.
Prescribing the Cure
Length: 4-6 pages,
double-spaced, one inch margins, Times New Roman 12 point font.
Please take the workplace problems that
you describing/diagnosing in Short Paper 1. Write this paper as if you were the consultant hired by your
company to fix its problems (those you identified in Short Paper 1). If your first paper felt like a
diagnosis, think of this one as a prescription. The theories you choose are up to you. You may wish to focus on a particular
chapter, or draw from various chapters as you pursue some theme that makes
sense to you when considering your workplace. (As with your first paper, you may alternatively choose to
examine past workplace experiences if you wish, but I prefer you focus on your
current situation.)
Again: I am looking for clear references
to the text and, where appropriate, other sources.
Grading:
The following objectives
for the course are tied to this assignment:
· Learn to apply various theories pertaining to
workplace dynamics to their own lives and the working conditions they
encounter;
· Be able to differentiate and appreciate the
usefulness of theoretic frameworks as tools for gaining insight into social
processes.
APPENDIX 3
Avoiding Plagiarism
From Beyond Feelings: A Guide to Critical
Thinking (7th ed)
By Vincent Ryan Ruggiero
Once
ideas are put into words and published, they become "intellectual
property," and the author has the same rights over them as he or she has
over a material possession such as a house or a car. The only real difference
is that intellectual property is purchased with mental effort rather than
money. Anyone who has ever wracked his or her brain trying to solve a problem
or trying to put an idea into clear and meaningful words can appreciate how
difficult mental effort can be.
Plagiarism is
passing off other people's ideas or words as one's own. It is doubly offensive
in that it both steals and deceives. In the academic world, plagiarism is
considered an ethical violation and is punished by a failing grade for a paper
or a course, or even by dismissal from the institution. Outside the academy, it
is a crime that can be prosecuted if the person to whom the ideas and words
belong wishes to bring charges.
Some cases of
plagiarism are attributable to intentional dishonesty, others to carelessness.
But many, perhaps most, are due to misunderstanding. The instructions
"Base your paper on research rather than on your own unfounded
opinions" and "Don't present other people's ideas as your own"
seem contradictory and may confuse students, especially if no clarification is
offered. Fortunately, there is a way to honor both instructions and, in the
process, to avoid plagiarism.
Step
1: When you are researching a topic, keep your
sources' ideas separate from your own. Begin by keeping a record of each
source of information you consult. For an Internet source, record the Web
site ad- dress, the author and title of the item, and the date you visited the
site. For a book, record the author, title, place of publication, publisher,
and date of publication. For a magazine or journal article, record the author,
title, the name of the publication, and its date of issue. For a TV or radio
broadcast, record the program title, station, and date of transmission.
Step 2: As
you read each source, note the ideas you want to refer to in your writing. If
the author's words are unusually clear and concise, copy them exactly and put quotation marks around them. Otherwise,
paraphrase-that is, restate the author's ideas in your own words. Write down
the number(s) of the page(s) on which the author's passage appears.
If the author's
idea triggers a response in your mind-such as a question, a connection between
this idea and something else you've read, or an experience of your own that
supports or challenges what the author says-write it down and put brackets (not
parentheses) around it so that you will be able to identify it as your own when
you review your notes. Here is a sample research record illustrating these two
steps:
Adler,
Mortimer J. The Great Ideas: A
Lexicon of Western Thought (New
York: Macmillan, 1992) Says that throughout the ages, from ancient Greece,
philosophers have argued about whether various ideas are true. Says it's
remarkable that most renowned thinkers have agreed about what truth is-"a
correspondence between thought and reality." 867 Also says that Freud saw
this as the scientific view of
truth. Quotes Freud: "This correspondence with the real external world we
call truth. It is the aim of scientific work, even when the practical value of
that work does not interest us." 869 [1 say true statements fit the facts;
false statements do not.p3
Whenever you
look back on this record, even a year from now, you will be able to tell at a
glance which ideas and words are the author's and which are yours. The first
three sentences are, with the exception of the directly quoted part, paraphrases
of the author's ideas. The fourth
is a direct quotation. The final sentence, in brackets, is your own idea.
Step 3: When
you compose your paper, work borrowed ideas and words into your own writing by
judicious use of quoting and paraphrasing. In addition, give credit to the
various authors. Your goal here is to eliminate all doubt about which ideas and
words belong to whom. In formal presentations, this crediting is done in
footnotes; in informal ones, it is done simply by mentioning the author's name.
Here is an
example of how the material from Mortimer Adler might be worked into a
composition. (Note the form that is used for the footnote.) The second
paragraph illustrates how your own idea might be expanded:
Mortimer J. Adler explains that throughout the ages, from the time of the ancient
Greeks, philosophers have argued about whether various ideas are true. But to
Adler the remarkable thing is that, even as they argued, most renowned thinkers
have agreed about what truth is. They saw it as "a correspondence between
thought and reality.” Adler points out that Sigmund Freud believed this was
also the scientific view of truth. He quotes Freud as follows: "This
correspondence with the real external world we call truth. It is the aim of scientific
work, even when the practical value of that work does not interest us."
This
correspondence view of truth is consistent with the commonsense rule that a
statement is true if it fits the facts and false if it does not. For example,
the statement "The twin towers of New York's World Trade Center were
destroyed on September 11, 2002" is false because they
were destroyed
the previous year. I may sincerely believe that it is true, but my believing in
no way affects the truth of the matter. In much the
same way,
if an innocent man is convicted of a crime, neither the court's decision nor
the world's acceptance of it will make him any less innocent. We may be free to
think what we wish, but our thinking can't alter reality.1
1
Mortimer I. Adler, The Great
Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought (New
York: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 867, 869.