Organizations are omnipresent and influence every aspect of human existence from birth to death. OSDC as an introductory course, assist you in understanding these organizations with an emphasis on the patterns, causes and management of organizational design and structure.

The domain of this course includes topics dealing with the impact of environment on organizations, various types of organizational structures and its determinants, organizational culture, relationship between organizational strategy and structure, and an introduction to organizational processes and organizational change.

Major objectives of the OSDC module are:
•To familiarize the participants with different concepts and terminology related to macro level analysis of organizational behaviour
•To develop an understanding of the nature, functioning and design of the organizations
•To examine the reciprocal relationship between organizational characteristics and managerial behaviour
•To help the participants to develop and apply the theoretical and practical insights regarding organizational processes for participating in / initiating efforts to change and adapt organizations to new challenges
You are expected to provide one page description about the chosen organization as the initial page of individual project and answer the questions provided by the facilitator at a later part of this course outline. Evaluation of this component is done based on the logical consistency and theoretical relevance of the submissions rather than the accuracy of data. Feel free to withhold sensitive information by providing slightly distorted data; but it should not reduce the learning value of Part 2 for remaining group members. Plagiarism will be seriously punished and any participant found guilty of submitting the work done by others (including the submissions made by past batches) will get F grade.
1.Relate your organization to one of the stages in competing value framework. Explain the HR challenges in your organization that is unique to the identified stage and effective approaches to address them.

2.Identify illustrations for minimum six types of resource dependence from your organization. All of them should be HR specific and cover distinctive options. Explain the logic behind the nature of such inter-organizational relationships from resource dependence theory. Do you feel the necessity for some improvement/redefinition of identified inter-organizational relationships? If so give reasons.

3.Choose two positions in your organization with significant differences in span of control. For example a position with the lowest and another with highest span of control. Explain the reasons for the variation in span of control.

4.Relate the existing structure of your organization to any structure discussed in chapter 6. What’s the impact of such a structure on the performance of a support function like HR? Does the structure impose limitations or advantage for HR function to attain its objectives?

5.What’s the role of HR department in defining the culture in your organization? Explain it from the perspective of any three of the following HR initiatives: (a) staffing (b) training (c) performance management (d) compensation (e) job rotation (f) diversity initiatives.

6.With a specific reference to functional level strategy, explain the relative importance of HR in determining the strategy of your organization (in comparison with other functions). Is the current structure of your organization is responsible for the current status of HR department in strategy formulation? Any suggestions for improvement?

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