BUS2014F - Organisational Behaviour and Research

Course Introduction

The primary aim of this course is to create an effective learning environment to further your understanding of human behaviour in organisations. The course provides you the opportunity to gain a rigorous conceptual and empirical understanding of the structure and function of human behaviour in organisations coupled with the ability to apply basic research skills to understand organisational life and published research. The course focuses equally on Organisational Behaviour (OB) topics and the quantitative skills necessary to understand OB research.

The first section of the course provides an overview of organisational behaviour knowledge. You will be expected to demonstrate your mastery of the materials learned and your ability to apply your OB knowledge in case analyses. An important course aim is to simplify and to complicate your understanding of human behaviour in organisations: to simplify by systematising and interrelating some basic ideas and to complicate by pointing out the infinite shades of grey and multitude of interacting variables that are present when attempting to make sense of human behaviour in organisations.

In the fast-paced, changing and unstable environments of modern organisations, executives need reliable and valid information on which to base their decisions. The second section of the course will provide you with a user-friendly, accessible and applied introduction to the methods for doing appropriate research and generating such information. You will learn to construct an argument with numbers, make sense of basic statistical reports, and begin to evaluate the reliability and validity of OB research.

The structure of the course is as follows:

Section 1: Organisational Behaviour

Week 1: Introducing OB
Week 2: Workplace Emotions, Values, and Attitudes
Week 3: Employee Motivation
Week 4: Team Processes
Week 5: Leadership
Week 6: Organisational culture

Section 2: Organisational Research

Week 7: What is research all about? Quantifying variables
Week 8: Describing distributions
Week 9: Types of research design
Week 10: Relationships between variables
Week 11: Making inferences about populations and finding differences between groups
Week 12: Measurement theory (performance appraisal application)
Week 13: Revision week