Human & Social Capital Paper

MGMT Paper: Human & Social Capital Paper

(No more than 1,000 words/about 3 pages)

Your individual assignment for the Human and Social Capital paper is to examine your last job (or an earlier job) and use theories and concepts from the course to analyze and explain your work experience. Essentially, in this assignment, you will use your job as the case material that allows you to demonstrate your understanding of course theories/concepts. You may use course materials from Sessions 1-8 in which we cover such topics as motivation, job design, reward systems, managing individual and group performance, and the interface between management decisions and strategy. Certain readings focus on specific theories (e.g. expectancy or equity theory) that provide a full framework for explaining and predicting behavior; while other readings include concepts that may not be full theories but can be abstracted and applied to a wide range of situations, e.g. Rewarding A While Hoping for B (Kerr).

The choice about what issues to cover and what theories/concepts to apply is yours. In evaluating your answer, we will look to see whether the theories/concepts you use are described accurately (i.e. substantively correct), applied appropriately (i.e. fit the job situation you describe), and most relevant to the situation (i.e. did you pick the theories/concepts that best illuminate your situation). 

In analyzing your job, focus on how you were managed, not how you behaved in managing others. It does not matter whether you had a good job experience or a bad job experience. You can talk about both the successful and the unsuccessful aspects of the job, and about what was missing for you. The paper presents you with an opportunity to explore in-depth the course readings, master them, and apply them to your experience. Thus, very good papers do not simply present a lively and detailed description of your past job. Rather, they demonstrate in-depth understanding and application of...