Organizational Behavior

Organizational Behavior (OB) can be regarded as one of the core disciplines of management. Sometimes the expressions “management” and “organizational behavior” are even used interchangeably. The crucial importance of OB for management lies in the fact that OB is concerned with people. That means that interactions between employees, relationships between subordinates and superiors, group dynamics, team success and many more topics that are related to the behavior of persons within organizations are the subject of OB. A (future) manager has to acquire knowledge on the different ways people can behave in an organization in order to successfully make decisions. Of course, leadership problems make up an important part of the knowledge on Organizational Behavior. However, the academic discipline of OB is much more than simply giving advice to managers how to lead people in groups or departments. 

This course aims at giving an introduction to the most important features of Organizational Behavior. Leadership, motivation, power, job satisfaction or group behavior in organizations will play important roles in this course. The perspective that will be taken in this course will be the one of a manager who has to deal with problems of leadership and motivation of employees. Therefore in addition to the theoretical considerations that will be made in this course, practical exercises as well as the presentation of case studies are also on the agenda of this course.

In presence

The course will to a great extent consist on a lecture that is based (in most cases) on the text book by Jerald Greenberg (2013): “Managing Behavior in Organizations” Essex: Prentice-Hall. The sessions that are based on the respective text book chapters or other readings will be a mixture of a seminar and a lecture. Subsequent to the lecture there will be a more practical session (case study or little experiments, simulations) that also relate to the topic of the preceding lecture.

There will be a final exam and some assignments during the semester. The exam counts for 80% of the grade and the assignments for 20%.