Content & Learning outcome:
People clearly are an organization’s most critical resource. Their knowledge and skills along with their commitment, creativity, and effort are the basis for competitive advantage. It is people that have creative ideas for new products or for process improvements that devise marketing strategy or take technologies to the next level. This course focuses on the people side of business.
As such, this course focuses on the people side of business from a general management perspective. Using important models and concepts of the fields of organization and leadership, you will analyze human behavior in organizational settings as well as organizational processes and systems.
Specifically, through this course you will learn:
| about individuals in organizations – how to understand, motivate, lead, and work with others;
| about teams – determinants of team effectiveness as well as dysfunctional tendencies of teams;
| about organizational processes and characteristics such as organizational culture, as well as the change and development of organizations.
Hence, the underlying objective of this course is for you to be familiar with important concepts of management and organizational behavior (i.e., know what they are), and to be able to apply these concepts in organizations (i.e., know how to use them).