ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR AND DESIGN

The course aims at providing the students with a conceptual framework regarding the approaches that can be adopted to design an organization, the knowledge of the main problems of organizational design at a firm level, the capability of analyzing, designing and evaluating the most important organizational solutions.

The participation to the course will allow students to:
Knowledge and understanding: to learn the relevant concepts of the organization design related to the division of labor and coordination; to understand the key variables and their impact on the organization design; to learn the organization design variables related to the micro-structure and meso-structure (horizontal and vertical division of labor, coordination and control mechanisms); to understand the differences among the organizational forms at the macro and inter-organizational levels of analysis.
Application of knowledge and understanding: to compare the different organizational solutions at the intra (micro, meso and macro) and at the inter-organizational level; to evaluate the impact of the key variables on the organization design variables; to compare the different organizational forms and to identify the contextual factors that lead to adopt specific design solutions.
Ability to formulate judgements: to analyze and critically evaluate the organization design solution adopted by a company; to propose effective and efficient organization design solutions.

Business Administration and Management

Introduction to the organizational design.
Organizational design and organizational theory.
The key variables of the organizational design.
Analysis and design of the organizational microstructure.
Analysis and design of the organizational mesostructured: the horizontal division of labor.
Analysis and design of the organizational mesostructured: the vertical division of labor.
Analysis and design of the organizational mesostructured: the coordination and control mechanisms.
The organizational forms.

Mandatory textbooks: Isotta, F., 2011, La progettazione organizzativa: problemi e soluzioni. CEDAM, Padova.

The written exam lasts 1 hour. The exam encompasses 30 questions (20 multiple choice questions and 10 sentence completion questions).

The course adopts the following learning methods:
- In-class lessons;
- Presentation and discussion of video clips that introduce and exemplify the topics of the course;
- Cases and exercises that allow students to apply the concepts presented during the course;
- Small groups activity that aims at stimulate students to describe the organization of the firm and to find solutions to organizational design problems.
The materials discussed during the in-class lessons, the cases and the exercises are available on the e-learning platform moodle.unive.it

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