This intensive course will consist of one brief introductory evening session followed by 5 full days. The course will provide students with an opportunity to reflect upon and improve their management of people in public organisations. This course is based upon the discipline of Organisational Behaviour (OB): the application of psychological principles to helping individuals, teams and organizations perform more effectively in the public sector. This is not a course in Human Resource Management: We will be adopting a more ‘bottom up’ approach focusing on people in context rather than organizational systems and processes.    The primary focus of the course will be on using OB principles and research for enhancing motivation and capability of individuals and teams. Along the way we will consider topics including: motivating people, using intrinsic and extrinsic rewards, building capability, creativity, decision making, stress, effective communication, conflict management and working in teams. The assessment will include one conceptual essay and one personal learning project applied to your own situation.  This course has some conceptual overlap with the course POGO8111 Public Sector Leadership and interested students might consider doing both courses. The primary difference is that this course focuses on motivation and capability, whereas POGO8111 focuses on leadership, power and influence.

At the end of this course, students who participate actively in the course should be able to:

• Apply a sound process of reasoning and judgment to a range of critical people management tasks
• Understand and apply ‘organisational behavior’ and ‘performance’ concepts in different public organisational contexts.
• Critically evaluate the likely effectiveness of different approaches to the management of individual performance in context.
• More effectively communicate to increase learning, trust, respect and motivation, particularly in ‘difficult’ situations.
• Apply people management theories and concepts to their own people management challenges including motivating people. 
• Apply people management theories and concepts to their own self- management challenges. 

The course is delivered in intensive mode, in three sessions of two days each (see Policy and Governance timetable for details).

Delivery Mode:

Intensive/on campus