People and Business Performance (MBA, Advanced Management Track)

Performance, performance, performance! The performance imperative is everywhere in organizations. At all levels, individuals, teams, divisions, and firms compete with one another and achieving high performance is key to winning the game. But what does it mean to perform in a world of sustainable growth, rapid innovation, digital disruption, and global crises? What are the levers of individual and team performance in modern fast-changing and complex business environments? Who should evaluate performance? How? And when? What does it take to build, lead and sustain high-performing organizations? None of these questions has an easy, ready-made answer. Together, we will take a step back, examine business cases, discuss the nature and implications of the performance imperative in modern organizations, and explore the key drivers of individual, team, and organizational performance.

Organization Theory (PhD Program, with Prof. Elie Matta)

The goal of this course is to introduce research in an area broadly defined as Organizational Theory. This is an inter-disciplinary domain of inquiry drawing primarily from sociology and economics and secondarily from psychology, and political science. It seeks to understand organizational processes and outcomes in the surrounding economic, cultural, and institutional context in which they are situated. Depending on your research area, different questions regarding organizations and their environments are stressed and different disciplinary tools are brought to bear to answer these questions. Thus, scholars who conduct research on strategic management and finance confront questions of firm performance in the market; psychologists, sociologists, and organization theorists who conduct research in organizational behavior confront questions of organizational process, culture, and politics; and engineers, economists, and sociologists who study innovation and entrepreneurship ask a series of questions about the circumstances under which organizations and markets support innovation and the development and growth of new organizations. We will also focus our attention on discussing how to read, evaluate, and develop theory and research and reviewing classic works that are most relevant to a wide variety of research interests.

The Social Evaluation of Organizations (PhD Program)

The research seminar offers an introduction to some of the contemporary discussions in organization theory (OT), management and strategy – as well as related disciplines, including sociology – that examine the interplay between organizations and broader society, and explore i) how organizations are evaluated by a variety of stakeholders and ii) how the conduct and performance of organizations are affected by these evaluations. The seminar is targeted at first- or second-year PhD students with interest in OT and strategy.