• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of core concepts and theories related to employee selection and retention, incentives, and the allocation of decision rights within organizations’ structures as building blocks of strategy implementation.
• Apply core concepts and theories to real-world cases, enabling them to predict and understand responses to (changes in) people practices, incentives, decision rights, and organizational structures.
• Evaluate benefits and potential pitfalls of implementing common people practices and forms of incentives and organizational structures.
• Recognize the interdependences between people practices, incentives, and organizational structures in influencing employee motivation and desired behaviors, such as initiative, prosocial behavior, coordination, cooperation, and trust.
• Explain the role of big data and analytics in people practices, incentives, and organization design, recognize its potential to analyse and predict employee behavior, and embrace and detect sources of ambiguity in such analyses.

This course is about how organizations can be designed to motivate, enable, attract, and retain people to pursue their strategic organizational goals, which can be economic, environmental, or societal in nature. The main goal is to equip students to support the implementation of set strategic goals in their future workplaces and responsibilities.

Incentives and decision rights are core elements of strategy implementation. Organizations need to encourage value-creating behavior and discourage value-destroying behavior to accomplish their strategic goals. To do so, it is important that organizations select and retain the right people, provide the right incentives, and organize their structure accordingly. However, these choices are often challenging: If we change the design of an organization, its incentive systems, or its decision rights, we will change how people in the organization act. These changes often have surprising and unintended effects.

In this course, we will draw on cutting edge research and core theoretical concepts from a variety of fields for students to better understand responses to common forms of incentives and organization designs and their alignment with strategy—such as organizational economics, organizational behavior, and strategy.

Who should take this course? This course should be taken by anyone who expects to have to think about people practices, incentives, and organization design and their consequences to implement organizations’ strategies and their economic, environmental, and societal goals—be it to manage a firm as a manager or when founding one’s own company, advise a firm as a strategy consultant, or redesign and evaluate firms and their business strategies. 

The Nordic Nine

The course aligns with the Nordic Nine framework, providing students an understanding of and ability to apply key concepts and theories broadly relevant to organizations (#1 “You have deep business knowledge placed in a broad context”). It employs a case-based approach, emphasizing group and class discussions for collaborative learning (#6 “You are critical when thinking and constructive when collaborating” and #8 “You grow by relearning and by teaching others to do the same”). Students engage in decision-making scenarios to reflect on business competitiveness while considering their societal impact and effects on employees and other stakeholders (#4 “You are competetive in business and compasisonate in society”). The curriculum explores the use of people analytics for analytical insights into employee behavior and addresses related ethical dilemmas (#2 “You are analytical with data and curious about ambiguity” and #5 “You understand ethical dilemmas and have the leadership values to overcome them”).