I. COURSE OVERVIEW  

This course gives students a theoretical and practical understanding of firms’ organizational design. To this end, the course first provides an overview of different schools and perspectives that developed organization theories. The other seminars then focus on specific areas of investigation by presenting the main theories developed in these areas, examples of research projects and future research trends. Specifically, the areas that are explored more in detail are: organizing Top Management Teams; organizational design of knowledge-intensive entrepreneurial ventures; organizing for sustainable effectiveness.

II. EXPECTED OUTCOMES

Students attending the course will develop knowledge about:

• The main organizational theories
• The main theoretical underpinnings of the research on organization of Top Management Teams. Students will also learn the key challenges of developing research in this area
• The main challenges of organizing entrepreneurial ventures, especially in knowledge-intensive industries where human capital is the main driver of competitive advantage
• The design and management of organizations from a sustainable work system perspective
• The most promising avenues of future research in the field of organization and management theory

III. LEARNING APPROACH

The course includes a mix of teaching-led lectures, reviews, and critical discussions of published articles and/or chapters. The underlying assumption is that organizations are living, open systems and that resorting to multiple approaches optimizes learning.

The course is organized in 5 seminars. Every seminar lasts for 3 hours. The course follows a modular-based design with a focused topic/theme in each session.

The development of a learning community requires active participation and active involvement of learners. Therefore, we expect that students attend all the class sessions, are prepared for the sessions and offer his/her inputs to the learning process.

The lectures will assign the final grade of the course considering three elements: i) four written Synopsis and Critique of a published paper/chapter, ii) active participation in the learning process/class discussion and, iii) Final paper. In the following, we report the points assigned to each element and the description of these elements:

Written Synopsis and Critique of a published paper/chapter. Each student is responsible to read all the reading material (i.e., four papers/chapters) assigned for each session. An additional optional reading is available for students interested in going deeper into the session topics. Moreover, each student has to prepare a Synopsis and Critique of one paper/chapter that lectures have previously assigned to her/him . As such, during the course each student turns in four Synopsis and Critiques Papers.

Active participation. The active involvement of each community member is uniquely important for the success of any learning community. Accordingly, we expect that students are prepared for the class sessions. To this end, each student should:

• Prepare the articles/chapters assigned to her/him
• Read all the other assigned articles/chapters

Lastly, we expect that students take an active role in class discussions about the added value of each article/chapter assigned.

Final paper. We consider this part of the course of direct relevance to your dissertation/research work. As such, each student has to write a paper within the broad area of OTD that relates to both the material covered in the course and your own research. The paper is conceived as a literature review about a specific topic (a minimum of 10 empirical-based published papers should serve as the foundation for the paper) that concludes with the identification of specific gaps and a set of possible research hypothesis/propositions for further investigations. The paper must not exceed 10 double spaced pages and follow the scientific format as follows:

Abstract; Introduction; Literature review; Research hypothesis/propositions based on identification of gaps; Conclusion; References.

Each student will be assigned one Final paper written by a colleague and will have to provide a critique similar in format to the Synopsis and Critiques s/he did during the course. The final papers and the critiques will be discussed during the final section of the course.

18 September 2017 14.30-17.30 - Organizations and the evolution of Organization Theories

19 September 2017 9.30-12.30 - Organizing for sustainable effectiveness

20 September 2017 9.30-12.30 - Organizing Top Management Teams

21 September 2017 9.30-12.30 - The organizational design of entrepreneurial ventures

16 October 2017 14.30-17.30 - Paper discussion