Organizational Behavior

• QST OB 870: Managing Corporate Turnarounds
  This course provides a framework for addressing troubled businesses. Understanding the causes and contexts of turnaround situations and successfully addressing associated performance and people issues is an essential managerial capability in the contemporary business environment. This course will provide students with a framework and tools to effectively manage a turnaround to improve business performance and retain key people. The focus is on the strategic and behavioral aspects of turnarounds rather than in-depth financial restructuring aspects. The course will provide students with the ability to: identify issues associated with a poorly performing business or enterprise, analyze various paths forward to address business underperformance, develop a comprehensive turnaround plan, including organizational and financial aspects, understand the role of external consultants in accelerating turnaround performance, and compare and contrast various senior leadership approaches to turnarounds, understand the levers, and explore ways they would address similar situations. The course will utilize case studies and feature guest speakers.
• QST OB 871: Crisis Leadership
  Crisis Leadership provides students the opportunity to develop skills needed to address the inevitable adverse conditions that will afflict their businesses, both for-profit and not-for-profit. The course will provide students with the ability to anticipate and identify potential crisis situations before they happen, understand the impact of stresses caused by crisis situations on individual and group decision making, and differentiate appropriate leadership strategies for responding to different types of crises, from routine to high profile life threatening situations. Students will also learn to prioritize and design appropriate responses to address crisis situations as they arise and effectively respond to crisis situations with all constituents: employees, customers, suppliers, communities and investors.
• QST OB 898: Directed Study: Organizational Behavior
  Graduate-level directed study in Organizational Behavior. 1, 2, or 3 cr. Application available on the Graduate Center website.
• QST OB 899: Directed Study: Organizational Behavior
  Graduate-level directed study in Organizational Behavior. 1, 2, or 3 cr. Application available on the Graduate Center website.
• QST OB 917: The Craft of Theorizing Research
  Research projects are like gems that need polishing and the craft of polishing them to uncover a theoretical contribution can partly be learned. This intensive course is designed to help participants polish their gems-in-the- making and sharpen their emerging contributions. The seminar is primarily designed for doctoral students who have already collected and/or analyzed data. The common denominator for participants is that they be engaged in research projects reliant on qualitative or quantitative data (e.g., archives, interviews, field observations, and surveys) and be willing to share with the class a draft analytical memo, paper, or chapter from their research.
• QST OB 918: Seminar in Micro Organizational Behavior
  Micro organizational behavior is the study of individual behavior and social processes in organizations. The goal of this doctoral course is to familiarize students with major conceptual frameworks, debates, and developments in the field of micro organizational behavior. This course will review the key literature in the study of individual behaviors, interpersonal relations, group dynamics, and the interplay between micro and macro dynamics in organizations. The readings and discussions will focus on core topics in the field, such as personality and individual differences, work attitudes, motivation, leadership, groups, ethics, culture, occupations, and change. This course is required of all first year doctoral students in Organizational Behavior and is open to other doctoral students with permission.
• QST OB 919: Seminar in Macro-Organizational Behavior
  This course examines theory and research about organization design, relations between organizations and environments, and inter-organizational relations. The emphasis is on the behavior of organizations as systems themselves and on their relations with the larger context in which they are embedded. The course examines topics such as: organizations as open systems, as institutions, as elements in ecological systems and other perspectives on large scale organization theory and dynamics. The course is a basic survey of theory and research on macro-organizational theory.
• QST OB 923: Field Studies Seminar
  This doctoral seminar is designed to introduce students to the process of qualitative research and provide them an opportunity to enrich their understanding and cultivate skills required for collecting, analyzing, theorizing and writing up qualitative data. By the end of the course, they should be more sensitive and skilled researchers, better readers, and/or more informed gate keepers of qualitative research. They should also be better, e.g. less fearful and more knowledgeable, writers of research. To enable this, we will focus on core practices of observation and listening, discovery and validation, theorizing, and writing and re-writing as applied in the context of qualitative research projects. We will combine practical, hands-on experiences (e.g., conducting an interview, analyzing a piece of text, writing our way to clarity) with readings about research methodology and examination of articles using qualitative research. The course assignments primarily involve the practical application of a qualitative method or approach as informed by the practice, readings, class discussion and students' deliberation and integration of the various materials.
• QST OB 990: Current Topics Seminar
  For PhD students in the Organizational Behavior department. Registered by permission only.
• QST OB 998: Directed Study: Organizational Behavior
  PhD-level directed study in Organizational Behavior. 1, 2, or 3 cr. Application available on the Graduate Center website.
• QST OB 999: Directed Study: Organizational Behavior
  PhD-level directed study in Organizational Behavior. 1, 2, or 3 cr. Application available on the Graduate Center website.

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