30465 - ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

Although quantitative and analytical skills are crucial for your future job, in your careers you will depend on people to accomplish tasks, goals and projects; you will need to work for other people, work with other people, and supervise other people. An understanding of the human side of management is an essential complement to the technical skills you are learning in other core courses. This course will focus on business organizations, yet you will find that the course concepts have valuable applications to any kind of organizations (non-profits, athletic teams, social clubs, religious and political groups). This course provides you with an introduction to organization behavior and applications of social psychology to human behavior in organizations. The aim is to strengthen your conceptual and analytical skills and enable you to assess what drives people’s behavior in work environments, the root causes of job performance. This is a highly useful skill to cultivate for a wide variety of managerial roles and positions and it is indispensable for working in a start-up or in family business, managing a company, consulting, auditing, and even in investment banking. The course is based on the notion that a satisfactory understanding of organizations requires the application of different lenses drawn from different disciplines including management studies, psychology, political science, economics and cognitive science. Moreover, such an understanding also requires examin

Diversity, equity, and inclusion

Job attitudes and behavior

Emotions and affect; emotional intelligence

Personality and individual differences

Motivation

Groups and group dynamics. 

Individual and group decision making

Power and leadership.

Conflict and negotiation 

Organizational structure and culture

Human resource systems

Stress and health in organizations

The course is designed to accomplish three main goals:

• Increase your knowledge of OB concepts so that you can understand and analyze how organizations and the people within them work.
• Provide you with opportunities to apply OB concepts to real-world problems faced by managers.
• Provide the ability to become knowledgeable organization members.

To effectively work in an organization, you must be able to diagnose problems, communicate clearly, make effective decisions, motivate and influence  others, manage diversity, and understand organizational structure and job design.

• Understand the functioning of an organizational system, the dimensions of individual and social behavior in an organization, organizational structure and culture and the main human resource management practices.
• Apply skills related to Individual Behavior and Group dynamics, effective communication and negotiation.

• Face-to-face lectures
• Guest speaker's talks (in class or in distance)
• Case studies /Incidents (traditional, online)
• Group assignments
• Interactive class activities on campus/online (role playing, business game, simulation, online forum, instant polls)

• In-class exercises to understand the language and to apply models and theory.
• Theories and/or case studies discussions (in-class).
• Group assignments to learn how to apply theories to reality.
• Interactive activities to learn and practice behavioral skills (communication, team work, negotiation).

To be considered attending, students should meet three conditions: (1) class attendance and participation, (2) submit group case assignment, and (3) submit field project assignment. 

1.   Class participation. To get the most out of this class and to maximize chances of learning and succeeding in the exam, students will need to come to class regularly and participate actively in class discussions as well as other class activities (e.g., class exercises, guest lectures, experimental session). Attendance will NOT be recorded through the University online procedure. It is an individual’s responsibility to decide to come to class. Note that all the materials discussed in class are part of the preparation for the midterm and the final exam. 

2.   Group case assignment. To be considered attending, students must upload this assignment by October 15th at 23:59. A detailed description along with instructions will be given in class. 

3.   Group field project. To be considered attending, students must upload the assignment by November 25th at 23:59, and present their work in class. The goal of this assignment is to analyze and apply theoretical concepts in a real organization. Group’s composition and the case study chosen by each group should be determined by students by September 25th. Groups should be around 8-9 people for a total number of maximum 12 groups. Your group’s task will be to use concepts from the course to identify, analyze, and develop a plan for solving a key problem that an organization is facing.

Each group will be responsible for finding a business organization to study using interviews, observations, and/or surveys. By October 4th, each group will communicate to me the organization that it will study. Of course, I would recommend starting the project earlier so that you have adequate time to collect data and write your report.

4.   Exams.

The midterm and the final exam are written and composed each of one open question (5 points) and 10 (midterm) and 11 (final) multiple-choice questions. The exams will consist of a mix of (i) pure theoretical questions and (ii) applications of models and theoretical concepts from the course materials, and is “closed-book”, “no-notes” (i.e., no materials can be used during the exam). Grading will follow a fixedgrade distribution based on the standard Bocconi policy.

The assessment of attending students is divided in a midterm exam (25% of the final grade), a final exam (25% of the final grade), a group case assignment (20%) and a graded field group work that includes a class presentation (30% of the final grade). 

For non-attending students, the assessment is based exclusively on their performance in the final exam. The final exam is a true-false and/or multiple-choice test (31 points), and is “closed-book”, “no-notes” (i.e., no materials can be used during the exam). The exam will consist of amix of (i) pure theoretical questions and (ii) applications of models and theoretical concepts and case studies from the textbook. It is graded witha range of 0 - 31 points, with a fixed grade distribution based on the standard Bocconi undergrad grading policy (from 0/31 to 17/31 the exam is failed) and no penalization for wrong answers.

The materials for this course consist of slides provided by the instructor, research and practitioner papers, and the following textbook:

Stephen P. Robbins & Timothy A. Judge. Organizational Behavior, 19th Edition (Global Edition). Pearson International, 2023.

In class, I will use slides to present the main ideas and guide the discussion. The slides will be posted on blackboard after each class. Studentscan download copies of the slides, but they need to connect to the Bocconi Library to search and download the articles.

In addition, case studies, role-playing and self-assessment exercises will be distributed in class, being part of the teaching material for the course. Notes taken in class are fundamental to integrate all the course materials provided by the instructor.

Note that for attending students this book is not a complete replacement for the assigned papers, lecture notes and slides, as it may follow a different organization: some issues that we cover in-depth in the course in class receive only a brief treatment in the book, and vice versa.

Textbook: Stephen P. Robbins & Timothy A. Judge. Organizational Behavior, 19th Edition (Global Edition). Pearson International, 2023.