Organizational Behavior Project

MANA3318 – Organizational Behavior Project – Spring 2017

I have designed this project with several ideas in mind. First, in order to enhance your learning

experience (and increase the quality of your project and your grade on it), you should choose an

organizational behavior topic that you are curious or passionate about. As the textbook points out in

Chapter 1, taking responsibility as a ‘co-producer’ of and an active participant in your own learning will

improve your learning outcomes.

Second, one of the things universities apparently need to do better at is teaching some of the

‘soft skills,’ such as planning, critical thinking, collaboration, communication and time management.

Therefore, part of the project is conceiving, planning, and executing your own project within the

guidelines I provide.

I am more than willing and available to coach and guide, steer you to particular resources, and

even offer some specific suggestions. But it is up to you to communicate to me any needs you have for

help along the way, and also to be a good-faith collaborator – don’t expect me to give too much away!

The project, and each step below can be turned in on Blackboard. Projects are due on April 29:

Step 1: Choose a topic

The first and most important step will be to choose a topic. This is also a step that needs to

happen early in the semester – your topic area is due on Saturday, Feb. 4. Your topic is not set in

stone when you turn it in, you may change it, but please notify me if you decide to change it.

I recommend using the textbook as a guide to choose a topic, but you could, for example, use

another textbook or some other resource on org behavior. Keep in mind that you will need to go

beyond what the book says – use the book to find a topic that you really want to learn about, but do not

plan on reproducing what the book says and how.

Make sure that you tie in your project to organizational behavior, rather than behavior or

psychology in general. Psychoanalysis, for example, could be a very interesting research topic, but you

would probably struggle to find enough application of psychoanalysis to organizations.

Example topic areas:

 

•  Cognitive moral development
•  Emotions and Moods at Work
• Office politics
• Cultural artifacts in organizations
•  The Kohler effect
•  Contingency theories of leadership
•  high involvement work systems
•  Social learning theory
•  cognitive appraisal theory of emotions

 

Step 2: Synopsis

What, more specifically, will you research about? Here, you must write a short synopsis of your

project, about 1⁄2 page double-spaced will suffice, though you can treat it as a short draft if you like.

Further define the scope of your project. This is an opportunity to communicate in greater detail your

project idea, potentially so that I can give you more feedback at this step. If this will be a team project,

you only need to turn in one synopsis for the team.