Organisations and People

The individual written assignment will take the form of individual reflection upon some aspect of your personal experience of management and organisations.

Throughout the module, and from your previous educational and work experiences, you will be exposed to various activities associated with Organisations and People, such as being recruited, managing employees, training and development, dealing with work-place relationships etc. Think about how management and organisation behaviour relates to you: have you been an employee; have you been a manager; how have you dealt with work-related conflict, perhaps during group-based assignments at university or work? These are all potential areas for you to reflect on. You are now required to write a reflective essay that

(a) makes use of the relevant theory to provide a detailed analysis of one aspect of your experience of management and organisation behaviour and

(b) considers the implications of your analysis for the effective management of people within organisations.

In practice, this means answering four simple questions (these may even be the headings you use in your individual assignment!):

1. What happened to me eg during a job interview, training session, appraisal meeting, or during group work? Give brief details of the context.

2. What worked well/not so well? Why might this have happened? What did I learn? What would I do differently next time?

3. What theories of management can explain what happened?

4. What could line managers and/or Human Resource professionals do to ensure things (continue to) work well in future and/or prevent such problems?

For example, your reflective essay may address one of the following topics:

1. A management training and development session

2. A performance review with your supervisor/line manager

3. A grievance with a colleague

4. Being selected for a talent development programme

5. Conflict within your group (at university or work organisation)

6. Cross-generational working

7. Issues surrounding group leadership/management (or a lack thereof!)

8. The impact of culture on group work

You need not be constrained by this list and should focus on a topic that you are interested in studying (and writing about) in detail.

A high quality reflective essay will involve:

• Meeting the terms of reference (objectives a and b)

• Excellent presentation and layout (style and structure)

• The ability to undertake constructive/honest self-reflection (openness, clarity and realism of reflective critique)

• The ability to analyse and provide explanations, linking to relevant literature

• An overall grasp and understanding of the processes involved.