Individual Paper

The individual paper involves analyzing a flawed instance of people management and decision making by you or others in your organizational life using the concepts and theories we learn in our course.

Specifically, this paper requires that you choose and analyze an event from your career that you now believe may have involved flawed people management and decision making by you, or others in your organization or industry. You may consider an inappropriate or unjustifiable people management approach or style (e.g., an instance of poor hiring, coaching, or training, or failure to generate buy-in in managing teams), or a decision that, among other things, attributed causation to a correlational relationship (e.g., an instance of hiring or promotion claimed to have increased revenues), a decision that involved cognitive biases (e.g., confirmation bias in hiring), and/or a decision that invoked conversations about fairness (e.g., a policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic).

Then, address the following:

1. Describe the event and provide context to a flawed instance of people management and decision making.
2. Identify the flaws that you believe were involved.
3. Explain the reasoning and/or evidence that now leads you to suspect the flaw.
4. Propose what you would have done differently to produce a better outcome at the time.
5. Explain how and why you believe your proposed approach might have improved the event in question.

In developing your individual paper, you will essentially use an event from your career as case material to explicitly highlight your knowledge of and ability to apply the concepts and theories from this course to analyze a potentially flawed instance of people management and decision making, and offer solutions.

The choice about the relative weight to put on different issues, ideas, concepts, and theories in reflecting on the situation in question is yours. In evaluating your paper, I will look to see whether the concepts and theories you use are described accurately (i.e. substantively correct), applied appropriately (i.e. fit the context you describe), and most relevant to the situation (i.e. did you pick the theories and concepts that best illuminate the situation).

Here are some additional tips you may consider in developing your paper:

1. Applying more theories is generally better than applying fewer theories. There are, however, two caveats: you need enough rich descriptive material about your chosen issue, and you need to cover each theory or concept thoroughly enough that convinces the audience that you know how to apply it. Theories that are covered superficially will not receive much credit.
2. Notice that this paper must be graded. It is easy to get carried away with an interesting issue and forget that this is also a way to test your knowledge of and ability to apply the course material.
3. Remember to explicitly mention and engage course concepts and theories. Drawing explicit links between the concepts you identify and the paper material is important.
4. It may be useful to develop a comparative angle in the project. For example, you may compare the organizations performance before and after the situation or decision in question.
5. When facing a choice as to whether to narrow your paper to a more focused topic, balance the benefits of this strategy in terms of richness, thoroughness and completeness with the costs of reduced data availability. Choose the narrowest possible issue that offers sufficient data and allows you to describe and integrate a discussion on people management.

Please keep the length of the paper to 8-12 pages of text (plus 1-2 pages of exhibits if needed). Please use double spacing, 12-point font, and 1-inch margins.

Rubric:

1. Originality in the Choice of the Event and Managerial Context (out of 10)
2. Specificity of the Analysis of the Flawed People Management and Decision Making (out of 35)
3. Quality of the Proposed People Management and Decision Remake (out of 25)
4. Clarity in Writing (out of 20)
5. Novelty (out of 10)