2024/2025 KAN-CCMVV2450U Designing Organizations: People, Incentives, and Structure
English Title | |
Designing Organizations: People, Incentives, and Structure |
Course information |
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Language | English |
Course ECTS | 7.5 ECTS |
Type | Elective |
Level | Full Degree Master |
Duration | One Quarter |
Start time of the course | Second Quarter |
Timetable | Course schedule will be posted at calendar.cbs.dk |
Study board |
Study Board for cand.merc. and GMA (CM)
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Course coordinator | |
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Teaching methods | |
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Last updated on 13-02-2024 |
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Learning objectives | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
At the end of the course, students should be able
to:
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Examination | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Course content, structure and pedagogical approach | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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. |
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Description of the teaching methods | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
By combining case studies and guest lectures with
cutting-edge research insights, class sessions focus on connecting
core theoretical concepts to real-world examples. Through
discussion, cases, and simulation exercises, students learn to
recognize possible pitfalls of incentives and organization design
choices in practice, and potential ways to avoid them. Cases are
selected to reflect recent and ongoing trends and expose students
to a variety of types of organizations and industries.
Students are guided in their preparation for each session based on a short list of questions, allowing them to focus on a few core takeaways. Pre-class preparation consists of videos, podcasts, and articles. |
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Feedback during the teaching period | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Feedback will be given as we discuss the cases and readings. Polls and multiple-choice questions will be used to also prompt discussions and enable feedback and encourage students to integrate reflections of their own experiences. Discussions are structured and accompanied to encourage students to collaborate in groups and exchange constructive feedback. Finally, students can also stop by to get feedback and ask questions during office hours. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Student workload | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Further Information | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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”). |
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Expected literature | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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