Syllabus

Organizational Behavior Summer 2013 – 37:575:345:T2
Course Instructor Amir H Maleki ah.maleki@rutgers.edu Description The field of organizational behavior (OB) is about understanding how people and groups in organizations behave, react, and interpret events. It also describes the role of organizational systems, structures, and processes in shaping behavior, and explains how organizations really work. Drawing from fields including management, anthropology, sociology, information technology, ethics, economics, and psychology, OB provides a foundation for the effective management of people in organizations. Because it explains how organizations work from individual motivation to team dynamics to organizational structure, knowing about OB is essential to being effective at all organizational levels. Because an organization’s people are responsible for gaining and keeping a competitive advantage, understanding how to mobilize and motivate employees is critical to organizational performance. Businesses excel when employees understand how their behaviors influence an organization’s performance and enable strategy execution, and when they are led effectively and are motivated to do their best. Competitors can often copy a firm’s technologies, products, processes, and structures, but it is difficult to duplicate a core of talented, knowledgeable, motivated employees who work together to achieve the firm’s goals and who care about their firm’s success. Understanding and practicing OB concepts is critical to understanding organizations and gives individuals, managers, and organizations the skills and tools they need to be effective. Organizational behavior is also the cornerstone of success for individuals in organizations. Even the most skilled nurse, salesperson, accountant, engineer, or anything else will be ineffective as an employee and as a manager without