solution

Conduct an analysis of your organization, exploring an aspect of organizational behaviour that interests you and that is relevant to the organization(s) you are studying. Your study should be analytical and issue-oriented, not merely descriptive. You will adopt the position of a management consultant, endeavouring to understand the organization and to propose actions that solve problems.

a. Use your organization for the study.

b. Select an issue. The range of options is large. It needs to involve organizational behaviour topics that are relevant to your organization your. An example of a topic:

i. the quality of work relationships and job satisfaction,

ii. goal commitment and job performance, and

iii. the personality trait of extraversion and sales.

It is very important that you focus your analysis on one core issue. Papers that attempt to do too much typically lose their focus and receive low marks. I encourage you to contact me to discuss your ideas for topics.

• Your Work

a. Gather relevant information and data. You have several options for gathering information and data. You may create and administer a survey. You may interview key informants from the organization you are studying. You may observe workers. Use any data collection procedure that will help you achieve your goals.

b. Analyze your problem or issue. Using the information you have gathered about the organization, draw some conclusions about the issue you are studying. Draw on the organizational behaviour literature relevant to your topic to help you analyze it. Your analysis should be clear, logical, and based on what you have learned from your data, the class, the text, and other readings. It is often helpful to include tables and figures in the report to clarify your analyses.

c. Generate suggested solutions. Given your analysis of the problem, generate key steps an organization can take to improve any problems and build on any strengths. Your suggestions should involve things an organization could actually do given constraints. It might be helpful to first lay-out all possible solutions, including “ideal” ones in a world without constraints, and then select from those, attempting to approximate the ideal ones. Your suggestions should be based whenever possible on general and guiding principles of organizational behaviour learned in the course.