Project: Organizational Case Study

For this course, you will have a course project that includes the written assignments in Weeks 1, 3, and 5. The Week 3 and Week 5 assignments are considered major assignments, which combined are worth over half of the total course points. It will likely take you more than one week to complete the Week 3 and 5 major assignments, so begin working on those tasks sooner rather than later.

Summary of weekly deliverables:

• Week 1: Identify a subject organization. Provide an initial assessment of some organizational problem utilizing relevant individual OB themes. Provide an annotated reference list of at least five peer-reviewed resources that can help you better understand the individual themes and assess the organizational problem.
• Week 3: On the basis of your Week 1 work, observations, interviews, and/or additional research, present a paper assessing the root causes of the organizational problem using individual OB themes.
• Week 5: On the basis of your Week 1 and Week 3 work, justify an action plan based in strong research. What are the consequences to the organization for failing to act? What are the benefits of addressing the problem? What are the recommended action steps for the organization?

For Week 1:

Tasks:

Locate a suitable subject organization for your course project. The organization can be your current organization or one that you are familiar with. Contact your instructor early in the week if you need assistance selecting an organization. For your paper, provide a summary of the organization. Include the following details in your summary:

• What is the organization?
• What does it do?
• Who does it do it to/for?

In organizational diagnosis, one of the first steps is an initial assessment of potential areas of concern. If you were contracting with an organization as a consultant, the CEO would likely share in the early conversations why you are being hired. As part of the process, you would make observations, look at some organizational documents, and even have some informal conversations with organizational members to get a sense of where issues might be located so that you can determine how you will gather necessary data for diagnosing problems and recommending solutions.

In your paper, provide an initial assessment of some organizational problems that are evident in your case study organization. In an actual consulting scenario, you would do your assessment on the basis of your full range of organizational and leadership theory knowledge; however, for this course project, focus on individual OB themes.

• What are the symptoms of the problems?
• What is the evidence that problems actually exist?
• What are the relevant individual OB themes that might explain the problems (and not just the symptoms)?

Remember, individual OB themes revolve around two questions:

• Why do people say what they say and do what they do?
• How do we enhance individual performance to achieve organizational goals?

On the basis of your initial assessment, one of the first things you will need to do is determine the additional information required for fully assessing the situation. In other words, what resources do you need to better understand the themes and assess the organizational difficulty? For your paper, provide an annotated reference list of at least five peer-reviewed sources that are relevant to your case study. Most of the references should relate to individual OB themes. However, at least one resource must relate to methodology (e.g., how to do organizational diagnosis). Remember, for APA, every reference must have at least one corresponding in-text citation. For this paper, the annotated reference list is your reference list, and entries need to be part of your research and support in the paper.

An annotated reference list means that each reference is followed by a brief (usually about 150 words) descriptive and evaluative paragraph. The purpose of the annotation is to inform the reader of the relevance, accuracy, and quality of the sources cited. Annotations are descriptive and critical; they expose the author’s point of view and authority.

Submission Details:

• Complete your analysis in a 5- to 6-page Microsoft Word document, using APA style.