General guidelines.
1. The purpose of the paper is to assess how students can apply a portion of the
course material to a case of their choosing. I am fairly open as to the case as long
as it involves organizational change. Here are some broad examples of cases that
have been used.
a. Attempts to increase employee productivity.
b. Changes in organizational policies or procedures.
c. Selling a product or service to an organization.
d. Altering the mission of an organization or unit.
e. Attempts by community stakeholder groups to convince an organization to
provide better services.
f. Dealing with problematic colleagues, employees or supervisors.
g. Increasing one’s salary and/or improving job requirements.
h. Adoption of a new technology or work practice.
i. Changing decision-making processes.
j. Requesting greater resources for one’s unit or division.
k. Attempts to merge units or companies.
l. Changing the physical work environment or location.
m. Some students with little experience with organizational change have written
about cases in their personal life (e.g., family).
2. You may choose a case in which you participated or one that you observed or
heard about.
3. You may choose a case in which the change was attempted and failed or one that
had not been attempted but you think should be. Do NOT choose a case that was
successful.
4. When writing the paper, you should ONLY use material contained in the course
modules. Do NOT make up your own theory and do NOT use theories from other
sources (e.g., other classes or the Internet).
5. Use only one to three perspectives to analyze the case. Do NOT try to mention
ideas in every module or everything within a module. There is too much. The
best papers use only a few perspectives and describe in detail how they apply to
the case. Papers that incorporate too many ideas are too superficial.
6. I want to protect anonymity for those involved in the case. Do NOT use actual
names and/or the name of the organization. Use pseudonyms rather than
identifiers. Also, if you are writing about the organization in which you are
currently working, you should send me the paper from an email address that is
NOT connected to your organization. At the end of the term, I will delete all
papers from my computer.
7. Position papers should be single spaced and no more than 10 pages.
use the content of the files attached and the outline format.
