COMM192 - Management and Organizational Behaviour Assignment

Assignment Task

This is a research paper that you will complete on your own and it is worth 20% of your course grade. For this project, you will select a very specific OB concept that you want to learn more about and that you think would be useful for you to learn more about. You will look up and summarize some of the research findings regarding this concept and discuss its relevance and usefulness to managers. You will likely not come close to covering all the research on the concept but it will be important to highlight some of the research findings about it (that you found most interesting and useful) in an organized fashion and discuss relevance for managers and organizations.

Questions:

1. How is the concept defined by the original or main author of the concept and what would be an example of this concept in the workplace?

2. Why is this concept important for managers to know about?

3. What are some of the things that this concept has been found to be related to in the organizational research? For example, what are some of the known causes of this concept, what are some of its consequences and/or what else is it related to in the workplace?

4. How can managers or organizations use this information? For example, how might it change how managers think about particular work problems or the employees they manage? Or what should managers or organizations do differently given what we have learned about this concept?

There are three objectives to this individual project. First, it will give you an opportunity to sink more deeply into a particular OB topic so you come away with a more expert understanding of it. Two, it will give you an appreciation for the research that lays behind the knowledge we share in this course. Third, it will give you confidence to look up primary research to find answers to organizational problems and apply those findings to improve organizational practice.

Finding A Concept

You will likely find it easier to focus on a specific concept in the textbook. If it’s too broad you may find this task overwhelming. For example, you may want to focus on personality traits or perceptual biases, but you would benefit from choosing one concept within, such as ‘openness to experience’ or ‘fundamental attribution error’. You may want to peruse the textbook chapters and find a particular concept that sounds like something worth learning more about. Ultimately, your goal is to find something very specific to focus on and summarize some of the research about it in more depth.

Here are some tips that may help you get started, but you are welcome to use a different approach:

• Consider the endnotes in the section of the textbook where your concept is mentioned. For example, in Chapter 4 (4th edition), the paragraphs that describe “Openness to Experience” include endnotes. These endnotes point to the published studies covering that concept in the back of the book.
• Look up the original journal publications noted in the textbook. Follow the guidance provided by our librarian.
• Often if you find one more current publication that covered the concept, you will see they mention other publications that you can also look up.
• You can also use library indices to look up other studies relevant to the concept. Again refer to our librarian’s guidance on this.
• Of course, these are merely suggested steps to get you started. You could skip the endnotes altogether, but given the textbook authors used them as a foundation, it is likely they offer some extremely useful groundwork for your investigation.
• Have fun. Curiosity is the basis of learning. And digging around for information on something that fascinates us is fulfilling.

Using Journal Articles

It is not easy to read journal articles and fortunately you do not have to read them in the traditional sense. Here though are some tips that will help you use them for your paper:

• Read the abstract which will be a summary of what the article found.
• Look at the introduction to get the gist of what the study is about: usually they start with an overview of things we already know about a topic, and then quickly they tell you what their study is going to focus on (that is unique yet related to what we already know). Introductions are also a great place to find reference to other studies that are looking at the same thing so you may find them useful for your paper.
• Skim some pages to find a visual model or look at the hypotheses they wrote out. That tells you some of the relationships they are going to look at.
• Skip over the sections entitled Methods and Results which may be the most difficult to discern (though you are certainly welcome to look at them if looking for something specific).
• Go to the Discussion where you will find they summarize what they found and also discuss why it matters. In the discussion you will also get some good ideas for why their findings are relevant to managers.

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