Five Ideas for a Fascinating Organizational Behavior Project

Examine the culture of an organization or industry

So here are some suggestions:

1) A cool project might be to examine the culture of an organization or industry and explain how the artifacts express the values and underlying assumptions. You could include pictures, stories, rituals, etc., and then explain what they say about the culture. You could also compare different cultures; for instance, how are hockey fights different from say baseball fights and what does that tell us about these different sports? As well, you could look at music—one of the best papers I read was from a student that compared the cultures of country music and rap music. She looked at the different artifacts and how they expressed the values of the groups and looked at how status was displayed. You can see how a project like that would be a lot of fun but also very illuminating! Imagine how popular you would be talking over eggnog at Christmas!

2) Pick an organization that you find interesting or that would be your dream job (Ideo, Lego, Tesla, Google, for example). How does this organization go about gaining competitive advantage by exploiting several or one of the key OB (Organizational Behavior) topics that we have covered in the course? (You can take any of the chapters in the textbook and see how the organization applies and/or modifies the concepts). For instance, what does IDEO do with the problem of groupthink, leadership, culture, conflict, etc.? How does their culture align with their strategy so that they can achieve a competitive advantage?

 

3) You could also take a movie or organization and look at how they try to motivate their characters or employees. Put another way, why do the people in movies do what they do? And how does their context encourage or discourage their efforts? If your team was hired as a consulting firm, what advice would you give to the organization to produce greater results and/or greater employee engagement?

 

4) One feature of our study of OB is that behaviour always occurs within a context. This is also true for leadership. So pick a hero/heroine from a movie or organization and explore this dynamic. How is the context responsible (at least in part) for the success of the leader? Think about Coach Carter (bball highschool coach); how did the context enable him to achieve his remarkable results? Would his approach have worked within a different setting, like the NBA or NCAA or even little league? Probably not. But why? And what advice would you then give to an aspiring coach or leader?

 

5) Finally, use this project as a type of diary to chronicle your attempts to meet with a CEO or someone else you want to meet, or a company where you want to work. Remember: “I’m a student at MacEwan working on a project …” and go from there. Try different strategies with different companies/people and see what works. If nothing else, you will be learning a valuable skill and increasing your social capital. Afterwards, you can reflect on your experience. Think big!

 

 

Project Rubric

Since I have given you so much latitude in picking the project it is tough to come up with a “one size fits all” rubric, and you should bear in mind that each project will be judged on its own merits. My goal is to provide you with something that gives you value; just making you write a paper for the sake of writing a paper seems pointless to me. I know that some of you need a bit of guidance and so here is a rubric that you may find helpful. Keep in mind that your project may take a different form than suggested by this rubric and that is fine.

 

Background    /10

Who are you and what are your career plans? Where do you hope to end up?

What is the company or what is the problem or phenomena that you are investigating? Who are you trying to meet?

(give me a little background)

 

Description of the Phenomena    /30

Here is where you can describe in greater detail what it is that you are looking at. You can think of this as the research question. You can point out the features and discuss the context within which this phenomenon occurs. Similarly, you can provide more detail about the person that you are trying to meet or the group you are trying to join. Why this group? Why this person?

How is this topic or person relevant to you and/or your career goals?

 

 

Major Findings /40

Ok. So you have looked at the topic and applied a theory but what have you found out?  

What are the major things that you have discovered about your topic?

What did you find out about how to join a group or meet a person?

What does your study tell us about how this world works?

What were the limitations of your study and/or the theories that you applied?

How might the people in this world view it?