BUS-W532 Organization Design Alternatives

• 7 weeks
• 1.5 credits
• Prerequisite(s): MBA Core, for those not in the MBA program, graduate student status and instructor's permission

In today’s changing environments existing organizations are constantly redesigned while new ones are born at a rapid rate. Well-designed organizations are more likely to survive, because they can meet the needs of external constituencies and play on the skills of their members. This course is designed to help students diagnose and assess the situations confronting the organization and consider the relative efficacy of the various strategies managers might use in those situations. These strategies must be closely linked to the organization’s structure, which involves dividing, assigning, and coordinating the organization’s task activities among positions, work teams, departments, and divisions. In turn, these structure decisions are influenced by such things as global competition, new technology developments, need for information processing, power and politics within the organization, and growth and design cycles. Students will develop skills in diagnosing constraints on their structural design decisions and optimizing those decisions despite the constraints, which should help them create effective organizations for any environment.

• External environment and inter-organizational relations
• Technology and structural dimensions
• Designs for domestic and global competition
• Information processing and decision making
• Power and political activities within internal markets
• Team building, networks, and intergroup relations
• Organization growth and decline
• Linkage between organization design and strategy