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Organization and Management
Overview
The Organization and Management Area has traditionally been one of the strengths of The Paul Merage School of Business. The doctoral program is one of the country's most prominent. The area has MBA alumni working as general managers, in consulting practices focused on managerial, strategic, and technology issues , and human resource leadership positions in most large regional firms, as well as nationally and internationally. Our MBA graduates are also in a diverse array of new start-up firms and technology-based companies.
The Organization and Management Area offers broad exposure to theory and research on both organization behavior and macro organization theory. Organizational behavior includes topics such as cross-cultural management, power and influence, negotiation, team and interpersonal processes, innovation, trust, organizational commitment, incentives, and leadership. Organization theory addresses contemporary theories about organizations (i.e., community and population ecology, institutional theory, networks, organizational learning and decision making) and applies them to understand new organizational foundings, growth, adaptation, design, performance, survival, and evolution.
The Organization and Management area at UC Irvine's Paul Merage School of Business is consistently recognized as one of the most productive group of scholars in the world. This means that doctoral students all obtain hands-on experience working on faculty research projects. The area faculty are members of the editorial boards of the premier academic journals in their fields and are leaders in their professional associations. Professor Jone Pearce and Lyman Porter are Past Presidents of the Academy of Management. They and Professor Claudia Schoonhoven are Fellows of this distinguished scholarly association. Our faculty are currently serving or have recently served on the Editorial Boards of Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Organization Science, among many others. Our faculty routinely receive grants from the National Science Foundation, the Kauffman Foundation, and other institutions.
Faculty
Visiting & Affiliated Faculty and Researchers
Primary Courses
200 Management of Complex Organizations
This course presents fundamental concepts, tools, and solutions from strategic management and organization studies as complementary tracks of knowledge to initiate students into the concrete challenges that managers in high performing organizations typically confront. You will begin to identify key issues in the competitive situation of a firm and to understand the implementation challenges to execute on these insights. The course introduces the foundations of strategy and competitive analysis, innovation as a strategic imperative, different frameworks for analyzing and designing organizations, key issues in effective managing and leading, social network analysis, and ethics in practice. You will be introduced to the pedagogical methods of case analysis, group problem solving, and group presentations as a means of developing the skills and strategies associated with effective managerial action. The course is structured as a full-time, in-residence “boot camp” and the pace is intense. The course also provides an opportunity to get to know your fellow students in the program as well as many of the core faculty who will teach the core courses in the first year.
202 Organizational Analysis for Management
This course is designed to increase your skill and effectiveness in analyzing and managing organizations, groups, and individuals. The course material will be useful in motivating others, managing relationships with people, making complex decisions, becoming a leader, managing and cultivating innovation, planning careers, improving team effectiveness, and structuring organizations. The course integrates concepts and theories with the practical realities of managing organizations. Ultimately, the tools and skills developed in this course should equip you to become more effective contributors to organizations that you join by developing your analytic/diagnostic skills. These skills include the ability to diagnose “real life” management situations and offer sound recommendations to improve learning, innovation, and effectiveness. The objective is to expose you to basic ideas, some applications of those ideas, and to give you a framework for organizing your own past experience. You will develop several frames or lenses that you can use to guide your future experiences in organizations. The course does not offer you a recipe of what to do but gives you a set of analytic skills and different ways of thinking that can help you address novel problems in organizations that operate in an information-rich environment.
296 Executive Leadership
This capstone course is focused on you answering three questions about yourself: Where am I currently as a leader? What are tools I can use to improve as a leader right now? What is my plan for my future career? To accomplish the first goal, you will measure and analyze your own leadership style, strengths, and weaknesses and receive feedback about your leadership from people who you lead at work. The special in-residence format of this course allows intense interaction with your peers that will also refine your understanding of yourself. This extensive and detailed data about your strengths and weaknesses is the foundation for acting to improve your leadership. The second goal of this course is to provide you with techniques and skills that will help you engage and mobilize your constituents as a leader – your clients and customers, colleagues, and direct reports. The third goal is to prepare you to take control of your career by creating an explicit career action plan (CAP). The CAP is a roadmap of the concrete steps you want to take to leverage your current resources to effectively move you forward professionally and personally.
Additional Courses
216 Management of High Technology Companies
High-technology firms face special rewards and risks beyond those faced by other firms. Technological change creates opportunities for new industries and products, but at the same time renders existing firm competencies irrelevant. This course examines how managers can identify competency-destroying technological change, exploit such change for competitive advantage, and maintain capabilities for innovation. The specific focus is on firms that sustain competitive advantage through IT, either as producers of IT-related products or through the use of IT to drive change in other industries.
220 Organizational Change
This course focuses on five aspects of organizational change: The challenge of change, the vision of change, the implementation of change, change recipients, and change agents. In the course, students will evaluate what needs to be changed, what to change to, how to make the change, who will be changing, and who will initiate and monitor the change process. The course uses applied practioner-based literature and academic research-based literature to analyze teaching cases and student's own experiences with organizational change. Several teaching cases demonstrate how technology drives change in organizations such as, a company adopting an Internet strategy or a company having to undergo major organizational restructuring due to the adoption of IT in their processes.
224 Strategic Human Resources Management
This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of managing human resources, with an emphasis on strategic HR planning. The course reviews how firms' HR system choices match various organizational strategies and contribute to firm performance. Topics include the design of staffing, training and development, performance appraisal, and reward systems as well as the evaluation of organizational effectiveness. Special attention is given to the fit of HR systems and firms' competitive strategies.
225 Negotiations
Global conflict, mergers and acquisitions, partnering between competitors, flattening organizational hierarchies, neighborhood and environmental disputes, changing family roles – could there possibly be a better time for developing your negotiation skills? Learning how to negotiate can help you become more professionally and personally effective and improve your relationships with subordinates, peers, patients, bosses, customers, suppliers and family members. While many of us might be “naturally” good negotiators, everyone can improve their skills through the acquisition of negotiation theories and concepts. By applying negotiation theories in simulated negotiations you will learn to a) prepare for negotiations, b) analyze different negotiation situations, c) ask for what you want, d) look for integrative, interest-based “solutions”, e) avoid agreeing to bad deals. The objective of this course is to change the way you negotiate so that you feel comfortable negotiating, can reach better agreements, and can manage conflict.
228 International Management
This course is an introduction to the effects of different cultures and political/economic systems on the assumptions, expectations and organizational practices relevant to conducting business in different national settings. Topics include culture, communication, influence, among others, with special attention to managing cross-national joint ventures, contracting and globally dispersed operations.
229 Leadership Strategies
This course provides students with insights and perspectives about leadership and how it relates to their career. In addition to examining frameworks for leadership and leadership theory, the course gives students a clear perspective on their assumptions and inclinations as a leader, as well as how others perceive them as a leader. Students develop a plan for improving their leadership and moving forward in their career.
290 Communication Skills
This 2-unit class is designed to help you communicate more effectively and strategically. Each of the five sessions will focus on a different communication format or type of communication including group presentations, meetings, one-on-one communication, difficult conversations and problem solving and requests or advocating for oneself. The goal of this class is to help you learn to develop and deliver messages that strategically address your target and have the impact you want.
290 Power In and Around Organizations
Power and influence processes are ubiquitous in organizational life -- and not just in large companies, nonprofit agencies, and public bureaucracies. Entrepreneurs learn quickly how resources and relationships matter for governance and finance opportunities; political dynamics shape outcomes and careers in investment banks and consulting firms. Effective, successful leaders and managers tap into organizational purpose, politics, and perspectives to attain critical organizational and professional goals. This course focuses on increasing your ability to analyze and utilize power dynamics in organizations. Throughout, the emphasis is on developing your skills in understanding and using power in order to be more effective in your work and your career. The course is also a further opportunity to consider leadership, which "paths to power" you will choose, and how to resolve the inevitable dilemmas and contradictions you will encounter along this path. We will focus on topics such as how managers manage their individual networks, with topics such as informal brokerage, mentoring, and ‘managing up’. We also examine the importance of networks in managing teams and innovation across organizational boundaries.
290 Strategic Communication
Leadership in organizations is achieved through communication. Failure to communicate effectively and strategically and to solve problems through dialogue can limit your career. Despite its importance, a great deal of communication in organizations is unclear, misunderstood and lacks strategic focus. Using experiential exercises as well as theory this course will help you learn to communicate strategically when presenting your ideas and when managing up, down, and laterally.
290 Global Team Collaboration
Increasingly, work occurs across organizational, regional, or national boundaries in teams and other collaborative efforts that are enabled by communication technology. Working in these collaborations requires skills in cross-cultural communication, technology use, and dynamic planning and design. This course addresses global collaboration using a multilevel, multidisciplinary, multicultural, and multifaceted approach. Lectures, case studies, exercises and discussions will proceed through a step-by-step examination of a comprehensive model of global collaborations. This model characterizes global collaborations as dynamic systems consisting of: (1) individual-level, collaboration-level, and organizational level inputs; (2) tasks, contexts, and technologies; (3) complex interaction processes; and (4) individual-level, group-level, and organizational level outputs such as creativity, innovation, productivity, financial return, and impact. By completing this course, students will: (1) gain greater understanding of the components that comprise global collaborations, (2) learn to identify key factors that influence performance in them, (3) develop skills in diagnosing opportunities and threats that face such collaborations, and (4) gain teamwork expertise by working in complex collaborations and analyzing their own experience in and contributions to them
290 Design/Grow Entrepreneurial Organizations
Information coming soon.
290 Misc. OM Elective
Information coming soon.
290 Develop Creative Thinking
Information coming soon.
290 Managing Organizational Networks
Relationships are important to what does (and does not) get done in organizations, but our understanding of organizational networks frequently fails to go beyond this basic recognition. As a result, networks often are an impediment to realizing our goals rather than a conduit, and managers often make poor choices in how they use networks. Throughout the course we will examine managers adding value and making mistakes, using the findings of social network analysis to understand managerial action. This case-based course focuses on how managers manage their individual networks, with topics such as informal brokerage, mentoring, ‘managing up’, and diversity. We also examine the importance of networks in managing teams and exchanges across organizational boundaries.
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