Posted: May 7th, 2015

Individual Organisational Problem Analysis

Individual Organisational Problem Analysis

Task Description:
The purpose of this assignment is to apply and to integrate the theories, models and concepts from the Managing OB course by examining how OB factors contribute to real-life organisational success or failure, and to further develop your written communication skills.

The Task
Locally, nationally and internationally, there are many organisations whose success or failure has been determined at least in part by key organisational behaviour and people factors. Success may not necessarily mean financial performance – it may mean that the organisation has effectively managed a “turnaround” of some sort (for example, a major change to ‘go green’ following an environmental incident or to improve diversity following being labelled a biased or discriminatory employer. Failure may not mean financial disaster – it may mean a loss of trust with stakeholders, the presence of unethical behaviour or a damaging culture, or the loss of key talent (employees) to competitors. There have been many examples in the media over the last five years. For example, culture, leadership, and motivation and reward systems were antecedents to Enron’s failure, which had severe consequences for its stakeholders.

What you are required to do:
1    Choose a real case of an organisation successfully (or less than successfully) dealing with a problem or a failure that has damaged the organisation in some way. Describe briefly what happened, the context, and the consequences of the success or failure for the organisation’s stakeholders. Note you should not select an organisation which is simply considered successful; the organisation must have faced a problem or failure.
2    Analyse the organisational behaviour factors that contributed to the problem / failure. These may be individual, group or organisational level factors. Your analysis should include a relevant analytical framework (e.g. SWOT, PESTEL or stakeholder analysis).
3    Describe what the organisation did to achieve success or post-failure to address the problem and or prevent a reoccurrence of the problem. Evaluate the effectiveness of the organisation’s action or response to the failure, and make recommendations for what could have been done better and/or moving forward. In making these recommendations, be pragmatic and specific (i.e. make recommendations that are viable and within the organisation’s capacity to implement).

In conducting your analysis:
1    Apply relevant models, concepts, theories and literature in the field of organisational behaviour. You are expected to incorporate relevant research and theory from the broader organisational behaviour literature (e.g., journal articles and/or books), not just the text and course materials (in addition to ‘other’ sources, your reference list should include a minimum of ten journal articles);
2    Conduct desk research to obtain information and/or data and examples to illustrate and support your analysis, evaluation and recommendations (e.g. media reports, interviews, independent investigation reports, organisational reports, etc.).