Assessment Details and Guidelines for Professional Writing and Presentation Style

Therefore, the learning outcomes in this module will be assessed by a summative assignment, instead of a MCQ test and closed-book examination. The details of the assignment are as follows:

professional writing and presentation style (e.g. Arial or a similar font, size 12, spaces between paragraphs, use of headings and sub-headings)

please reference appropriately in the text as well as provide a reference list at the end of the assignment according to the guidance provided on how to reference using the Harvard Referencing Style

The Task

What lessons can be learned about the behaviour of people in organisations from the three case study analyses conducted?

Critically analyse the case studies (motivation, managing conflict and negotiating, and power, influence and politics) drawing upon the academic material covered in the module, including sources from your independent inquiry, to support your analyses, argument and conclusions.

The assignment video case studies (three case studies: one micro (motivation), one meso (managing conflict and negotiation) and one macro (power, influence and politics) level analysis). You are required to conduct an independent enquiry into the cases and should entail the following:

1. Approaching carefully and critically the three case studies.

Approaching critically means that you should be:

·Identifying and questioning assumptions underlying the thinking and behaviours of various actors in the case study;

·Identifying and evaluating alternative perspectives of different actors in the case study and potentially also of those not mentioned in the case study but relevant to it;

·Contextualising the organisation and human behaviour; this means relating them to the state and events of the wider environment and historical context;

·Exercising reflective scepticism in relation to any statements or pronouncements made or evidence given in the case study; this means that you should retain the awareness of being told only parts of the story and avoid taking things for granted; it also means that you should be aware of your own subjectivities in any conclusions that you may draw about the case, and that you should question your own thinking as much as you question anybody else’s.

2. Identifying links between organisational practices described in the cases and OBA topics and theories covered on the module.

The case studies will be designed in such a way as to be relevant to all parts of the module, although it may concentrate on some areas more than others. In making the links, you will need to aim to achieve a good balance of breadth and depth of exploration of individual topics.

3. Exploring and researching those links by reading widely, systematically and thoroughly through the relevant parts of the module reading lists given in this handbook.

As you do so, you need to differentiate between the levels of quality of literature sources. Whereas we believe that all literature sources on the reading lists are worth reading (otherwise they would not be there), textbooks should be viewed as introductory readings into topics that can give you the general idea about the subject matter and lead into relevant bodies of literature, rather than ultimate authorities or deposits of advanced scholarship. The latter qualities are typically associated with original literature sources – normally peer-reviewed journal articles and specialised scholarly books (such as monographs, handbooks and edited collections), which are viewed as high-quality sources. Additionally, you can explore OBA literature beyond the module reading lists, but you need to keep the above quality criteria in mind.

4. Deciding on how you will bring together the literature you read, and the organisational realities as represented in the case studies.

Remember that this can work both ways: you can use OBA theories to analyse and critique the case, and you can use the case to comment on, explain and critique OBA theories. This 2-way dialogue between theories and practice is a great way of generating some insight and originality – i.e. constructing an argument that makes sense of complex organisations and takes us beyond what we already knew about organisational life.

What lessons can be learned about the behaviour of people in organisations from the three case study analyses conducted?

Critically analyse the case studies drawing upon the academic material covered in the module, including sources from your independent inquiry, to support your analyses, argument and conclusions.