Teaching

MBA: Managing People in the Global Context

An organization’s most valued resource is its people. Hence, managing people effectively is critical to organizational success. But organizations in today’s business world are integrally linked to the global economy and many of you will manage teams of people located in different countries. When managing people in the global context, how should you think about people decisions? In particular, should you follow a “one-size-fits-all” universalistic approach or should you customize your management practices to local contexts and institutions? If customization is necessary, what are the different local institutions that could affect people-management decisions?

We will answer these questions while learning about recruitment, compensation, performance management, diversity management, global teams, job design and global supply chains. In each class, we will discuss a case about a firm dealing with a specific people management problem in a specific part of the world, and we will use this example to understand how local institutions and norms dramatically influence HR solutions. In doing so, we will cover a range of carefully picked global industries including microfinance, IT services and manufacturing and understand local institutions in countries as diverse as Japan, South Africa, France, Kenya and China. Further, in most classes we will be hosting a distinguished guest speaker who will provide additional insights on the topic being discussed in class. 

This course is practical but based on social science research. Where relevant, students are encouraged to bring their own experiences and illustrations into class discussion. 

PhD: Full-Cycle Research Design

In this class, you will learn how to effectively combine qualitative research methods, including ethnographic observation and interviews, with experimental methods, to investigate questions of interest and probe mechanisms in the study of work, organizations and markets.

The full cycle research model combines multiple methodologies in a cyclical manner in order to enhance the power, generality and conceptual underpinnings of the phenomenon being studied. It begins with (a) ethnographic observation of social phenomena to identify naturally occurring puzzles and theorize about the causes of the puzzle, followed by (b) experimental tests of the theory, and finally (c) further field data collection to enhance understanding of the experimental results. The initial qualitative data accurately and richly describe real-world issues that are worth studying and generate theory close to the “field” or immediate experiences of informants, while the experimental data identify simple, generalizable causal relationships. The subsequent field data probe deeper into the findings from the experimentation and investigate mechanisms underlying the causal relationships. This cyclical use of diverse methods, both inductive and deductive, in a single research program allows each method to complement the other and offers richer insights than using any single method.

This class is applied. Rather than only reading about and developing a theoretical understanding of the full-cycle research process, you will actually collect data, analyze it, and execute a “quick-and-dirty” full-cycle research process to write a simple paper by the end of the quarter.