Understanding Organizations

Prof. Christopher Smith
Required Core Course
Fall -- 1 credit
 
Successful implementation of planned strategy is the result of appropriate actions of individuals and groups working in well-designed organizations. The resource-based-view (RBV) of the firm goes further and proposes that organizational processes, routines and cultures are the core of sustainable competitive advantage i.e. they are "strategy".

Hence the managers most likely to win the long term strategic battles will be those who best understand how to design structural and group processes to interact with individual characteristics to drive the behaviour or people in organizations to achieve the goals of the organization. This course aims to develop critical understandings and insights about organizations to enable participants to diagnose the major individual and group processes that underlie patterns of organizational behaviour and to design a variety of alternatives courses of action at different levels that organizations can initiate to optimize particular outcomes.