Organisational Behavior and Leadership

Introduction

This course is a Norwegian version of the international business school subject "Organizational Behavior." The subject focuses on how individuals' characteristics, efforts, interactions, and leadership have a fundamental impact on organizations' effectiveness, profitability, and value. The course emphasizes human characteristics and processes.

The course covers the most central and research-based knowledge about human characteristics, processes, and interactions in a complex work environment. It also introduces organizational theory topics such as organizational culture and design. The organization is both a context and a tool where individuals with different characteristics interact to create value. Leadership is a central process in all of this, providing direction, mobilizing efforts, and contributing to the success of employees, groups, and organizations.

The course aims to cover topics such as learning, what motivates people, perception, how human characteristics can be characterized, and how such characteristics and processes can be linked to well-being, health, effort, and productivity. Furthermore, the course provides knowledge about groups and teams, work environment, characteristics of creativity, problem-solving, and decision-making. Special attention will be given to key aspects of management, including leadership during change processes and e-leadership. The course provides a broad and fundamental introduction to how to facilitate the sustainable use of human resources.

Organizational behaviour and leadership is an important subject that, when applied effectively, can contribute to human productivity, well-being, and value creation in organizations. The rationale behind this is that good leadership and adequate organizational principles can explain performance, well-being, loyalty, and financial results. Many of the largest and most effective companies in the world systematically invest in developing their organizations based on the most central knowledge in this field. By applying knowledge of effective decision-making, learning, motivation, and communication processes, well-being and effort will increase.

Against this backdrop, students will develop an understanding that both psychological characteristics and processes, leadership processes, and organizational conditions have a significant impact on value creation in the workplace.

Course content

• The course covers various topics related to individuals in groups and organizations, including:
  • Individual characteristics and productivity in organizations.
  • Motivation, attitudes, and performance.
  • Thinking at work: learning, problem-solving, decision-making, and creativity.
  • Work in groups and teams
  • Work climate.
  • Power, and influence.
  • Diversity in the workplace.
• Organizational theory topics such as:
  • The purpose and existence of organizations.
  • Organizational design
  • Organizational structure
  • Organizational culture
  • Organizational change
  • Third-party collaboration in the Norwegian workplace
• Leadership topics, including:
  • What is leadership?
  • What do leaders do at work?
  • Leadership traits, behaviour, and leader-member relationships
  • Diversity in leadership
  • Leadership and technology
  • Destructive leadership
  • Leadership and social responsibility

Disclaimer

This is an excerpt from the complete course description for the course. If you are an active student at BI, you can find the complete course descriptions with information on eg. learning goals, learning process, curriculum and exam at portal.bi.no. We reserve the right to make changes to this description.