version Date: April - The Wharton School of the University of ...

Management 621 The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania MBAExec (West) – Summer 2012
plan to return these one-page papers with comments but no grade -- just check, check-plus, checkminus
-- and no role in the ultimate grading process. This assignment is due in class on Thursday,
May 24; I’ll provide the assignment details on Day 1. I’ll also explain other opportunities for writing
feedback in this course.
COURSE PAPER #1: ANALYSIS OF YOUR CURRENT (OR PREVIOUS) JOB
The first graded individual assignment is to analyze your current job (or a previous job) using
course concepts. More precisely, you should use your job as the “case” that allows you to apply and
demonstrate your knowledge of the course material. You may explore such issues as motivation, job
design, reward systems, managing individual and group performance, and group influences on
decision-making. The choice about what issues to cover and what concepts to apply is yours. In
evaluating your paper, we will look to see whether the concepts you use are described accurately (i.e.
substantively correct), applied appropriately (i.e. fit the job situation you describe), and most relevant
to the situation (i.e. did you pick the concepts that best illuminates your job situation). This paper will
count for 20% of your course grade.
In analyzing your job, focus on how you were managed, not how you behaved in managing
others. It does not matter whether you had a good job experience or a bad job experience. You can
talk about both the successful and the unsuccessful aspects of the job, and about what was missing for
you. Very good papers will provide the reader with two things: 1) a sense of how the various issues fit
together analytically, and 2) a clear feeling for what it was really like to have that job.
You need to be explicit in your use of the course theories/concepts. Very good papers do not
simply present a lively and detailed description of your past job. Rather, they demonstrate in-depth
understanding and application of course concepts and theories.
Here’s my guidance on how many concepts/theories you should use. More theories can be
better, because you can analyze more aspects of your job plus demonstrate more knowledge of course
material. Thus a paper that uses more theories and does so effectively can end up with a higher rank in
the relative comparison (which is how we grade these papers). However, there are definitely
diminishing returns if you cover lots of theories, all of them superficially, since this can make it tough
to see if you actually understand them and how to apply them. Plus you need to provide enough rich
descriptive material about your job so we can understand it. So I ask for a minimum of three
concepts/theories. One theory is not enough, six is very likely too many. Within that range, we look
for you making wise choices about the concepts and theories that best fit your job situation; extra
theories that don’t really fit won’t help you.
In using multiple concepts and theories, you also have the opportunity to explore (and
demonstrate your understanding of) the similarities, complementarities, or inconsistencies among the
concepts and theories (i.e., do the concepts/theories fit together and reinforce each other or do they
disagree How do they complement each other Conversely, how are they inconsistent or
conflicting). This is not required but is something you can consider doing to strengthen your paper,
assuming that your job situation provides you with the raw material for this analysis.
Here are a few more words of advice based on our past experiences with these papers:
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