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Hello and thank you for enrolling in GM591! You will find this course to be one of the more challenging yet interesting courses that you will take in your curriculum.

The purpose of this course is ultimately to improve your effectiveness as a manager by introducing you to frameworks from the social sciences that are useful for understanding organizational processes, and also to give you experience in applying these frameworks to particular situations. As you will learn, organizations have been studied from the perspectives of several disciplines, including economics, psychology, sociology, and political science. The field of organizational behavior is at the intersection of these disciplines and focuses on applying their insights to diagnose and solve organizational and leadership problems.

A basic premise of this course is that people, situations, and organizations are complicated and dynamic. Becoming a successful manager and leader requires a broad understanding of organizational behavior theory and a well-developed toolkit of practical approaches to problems that you can apply in various settings. There is not one unifying management principle that you can learn to be prepared for with all things to come. Practices that worked well in the past will not necessarily continue to work well in the future, and changes that helped one type of firm may harm another. In this class, we aim to learn how to make good inferences about what will and will not work in particular situations, and how to learn from your own experiences and those of others. The best way to accomplish this is through exposure to both rigorous research and real-world case study, and that is how the course is structured.

We begin the course by focusing on the first building block of organizations