Organizational Psychology

Course Description

This course is concerned with analyzing the external and internal system dynamics that maximize performance excellence of individual and work groups in an organization. Organizational Psychology focuses on the human factor of business. This course applies Organizational Psychology theories and techniques to the features/dimensions of corporate structure that are transforming in order to accommodate the changes in the modern world. An understanding of external and internal customer relations in the transformed organizations is discussed.

Topics and Objectives

Creating Performance Excellence

• Define organizational psychology.
• Identify a set of key features shared by the transformed organizational systems paradigm.
• Apply the definition of organizational psychology to the new model adapted by modern organizations.
• Assess the skills needed by managers and employees in the transformed organizational model.
• Describe diversity and explain how it is a key feature of the transformed company.
• Determine factors required to manage a diverse workforce in a company that is changing to the transformed model.

Effective Social Organizations

• Describe flexibility as a key feature that is necessary for the transformed organization.
• Explain how psychological approaches maintain sustainable learning as an important skill for all employees, one that contributes to the flexibility of the transformed organization.

Job Satisfaction

• Describe the challenges that the transformed organization faces to maintain employee satisfaction at all levels.
• Apply methods an industrial/organizational psychologist can suggest to maintain job satisfaction in the transformed organization.

Managing Intergroup Relationships in the Workplace

• Describe the key features of a flat organization.
• Explain how the hierarchy of an organization changes in the transformed organizational model.
• Predict how the flat organization changes "empowerment" at the operating levels of the transformed organization.
• Relate the knowledge that a modern manager must have concerning human behavior, cognition, and affect in order to enhance intergroup relationships the workplace.

Effective Stress Reduction Programs

• Describe the relationship between stress in the workplace and work relationships.
• Apply stress reduction techniques to the areas of change that occur in the transformed organization.

Enhancing Customer Relationships

• Describe networking and explain how it is utilized in the transformed organization.
• Specify internal and external customer communication pathways that need to be established in a networked organization.
• Propose an environment that is supportive of team functioning and learning and that allows for sustainable innovation and creativity.
• Distinguish the differences between leadership and management and how these differences affect networking.
• Explain how to negotiate change in a networked organization.
• Evaluate both strengths and weaknesses of group problem-solving approaches.
• Describe the characteristics of a virtual company.

Conflict Management

• Demonstrate how to develop healthy alliances between an organization and its networked internal and external stakeholders.
• Determine the differences between constructive and destructive conflict styles.

Global Features of the Modern Organization

• Describe globalism and explain how it relates to the transformed organization.
• Define corporate culture as it applies to the transformed organization.
• Apply the concept of corporate culture to internal and external customer relations and social responsibility.