OB & L Topics and Themes - Dr.

Aamir Khan - Project 1

Spring Term 2024

CLO 1: What is the Role of a Manager?

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CLO 2: Career Management

How to manage, shape and forge one’s career. What are the stages? How do we progress over
time? What are the skills we need? What are the mistakes we make? When to switch?

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Acquisition of Learning, Knowledge and Skills

e.g. Learning within an organization; courses and training done from outside the
organization; Learning from mentors; Learning from old MBA cases; Learning from
observation; Learning from experiences

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Interview Management

Big part of our course. Soon you will be interviewing (i.e. you will be interviewed). What
mistakes will you make? What can you do to avoid them?

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Pressure Handling

How do professionals handle pressure?

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Job switching (and Industry switching)

Job switching is mentioned above in Career Management but I am making it a separate topic
here as it is very important in its own right. Why switch? When to switch?

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Handling Resignations

Find out good and bad ways of resigning

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Motivation

Over one’s career, motivations change. How? How to manage one’s de-motivation? How to
manage our subordinates’ motivations? The role of monetary and non-monetary motivations?

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A sense of Personal Stagnation

Find examples from your interviews

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Evaluation

Are all systems of evaluation based on some kind of in-built motivation management? How
are evaluations made in different companies? What is the role of Absolute versus Relative
evaluations? How are KPIs changed (e.g. in Metro)?

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Self-Managed Teams

Can we have self-managed teams? What are the advantages and what are the disadvantages?
Are there examples of it? How will they be motivated and how will they be evaluated?

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Gender and Issues faced by women managers

Do companies discriminate against women?

What issues do women managers face?

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Credit Stealing

What is credit stealing? Many juniors claim their credit was stolen. But seniors say juniors do
not understand what they are saying and credit cannot be given in all situations? Find
examples.

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Boss Management (and boss’s boss management)

Bosses have different personalities. How to understand them? How to understand situations?
How to understand our own personalities? How to communicate with bosses? Boss
management for me is the most important theme in our OB course.

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Relationship Management

Boss management is part of Relationship management which also includes Peer

management.

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Communication Management

Are we born into introvert versus extroverts? Do we need extroverts for some jobs? What do
we do when the person is introvert but he or she needs to be extrovert? Can we train him or
her?
What are in general issues of communication within a company? How can a company learn to
allow communication from bottom to top? How can change management happen with good
communication strategies?
How to manage email communication?
Use and Misuse of social media in corporate communications

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Personality

What is personality? What are traits? Can we change personality? Think of your cases: What
was the personality of Steve Jobs like? Elon Musk’s? Jonah? Pakistani cases? What can we
learn from the literature?

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Fit between Person and Organization

What are the variables in this equation? What does it even mean?

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Cognitive Biases

Over-confidence bias; Confirmation bias; Hindsight bias; many others

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Emotions

We like to think we professionals are rational. What role do emotions play in one’s
professional life? What is Emotional Quotient? How to manage emotions?

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Organizational Politics

How to manage them

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Big Mistakes

What are some of the big mistakes professionals have made? What is their view of them?
What can one do to avoid them?

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Trouble-makers

Who are they? How to manage them? How not to be one of them?

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Conflict Management

Conflicts within an organization can arise out of one person (personality, trouble-maker) etc.,
inter-personal, intra-departmental, inter-departmental, organization-wide etc. Solutions may
take days, weeks, months or longer-term.

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Health Management

Health is now a major concern for managers. What do good managers do to maintain good
health?

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Importance of Marriage in a Profession

An under-researched but very important topic. Find out more.

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Discrimination against Singles

Is there such discrimination?

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Importance of Relocation

How important is relocation? What should we expect?

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Loyalty with Organization and Implicit Contracts

Is there some kind of ‘loyalty’ or it is a myth? What is an implicit contract?

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Ethics

What is Ethics? How are companies installing ethical systems and practices? How can we
measure these?

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Stressful Conversations

Find out what these are. How can we conduct better stressful conversations?

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Power and Negotiations

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Structure of an Organization

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Culture of an Organization

What is meant by culture? Is it a very wide term and thus useless? Can we measure culture?
The best guide is Harvard’s note on Organizational Culture.

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Change Management

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Safe to Say
How can organizations ensure that it is safe to say within an organization? How can they
measure it?

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