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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: 4
Management 621 The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania MBAExec (West) – Summer 2012 • Don't forget that this is an exercise that must be graded. It is easy to get carried away with an interesting story and forget that this is also a way to test your knowledge of and ability to apply the course material. • Be sure to explore your personal experience with your job, rather than writing generically about the experience of all people in positions like yours. • It may be useful to develop a comparative angle in the paper, i.e. compare how your job experience varied for two different tasks or compare your job before and after a change in your boss or a company restructuring. • Remember to mention course theories specifically, so we don’t have to read your mind to figure out what concepts you are applying to your work experience. Drawing explicit links between the concepts you identify and the case material is the key. Don't just drop in the names of a few theories or concepts into the midst of describing your job. Show how they apply to your situation. • Don't simply focus on your favorite issue, or spend a lot of time on issues that aren't relevant to this course. The paper should have a normal font and be double-spaced. The maximum length is 1,250 words, plus or minus 5%. Please include a word count on the front page. You will have to be concise and make choices about what issues to discuss. Formal references or footnotes are not necessary for readings in the bulkpack, though be sure to identify a theory or an author explicitly in the text. This paper is due via submission to webCafé by the end of day on Saturday, June 23rd. COURSE PAPER #2: INDIVIDUAL CASE ANALYSIS For the second individual assignment, I ask you to submit a written analysis of a new case, to be distributed, along with the questions to address, roughly a month before the paper is due. As with Paper #1, I will be looking for the application of course concepts. The maximum length for this case analysis is 1,500 words, plus or minus 5%; it should have a normal-sized font and be double-spaced. Please include a word count on the front page. In view of the word limit, it is not advisable to summarize case data in the report, but to use data selectively to make specific points. The grade will be based on the quality of the ideas, the appropriateness of the concepts chosen, and on how convincingly the arguments are made. This case analysis will count for 20% of your grade. It is due via submission to webCafé by the end of day on Wednesday, July 25. FIELD APPLICATION PROJECT (FAP) The major group assignment for this course is the Field Application Project (FAP), carried out through learning teams. To guide you through this project, I’ve developed a separate FAP Handbook, which will distributed to you early in the course. I also summarize the main elements of the FAP here. 5
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