Design­ing Or­gan­iz­a­tions: People, In­cent­ives, and Struc­ture

Course content

This course is about how organizations can be designed to motivate, enable, attract, and retain people to pursue their strategic organizational goals, which can be economic, environmental, or societal in nature. The main goal is to equip students to support the implementation of set strategic goals in their future workplaces and responsibilities.

Incentives and decision rights are core elements of strategy implementation. Organizations need to encourage value-creating behavior and discourage value-destroying behavior to accomplish their strategic goals. To do so, it is important that organizations select and retain the right people, provide the right incentives, and organize their structure accordingly. However, these choices are often challenging: If we change the design of an organization, its incentive systems, or its decision rights, we will change how people in the organization act. These changes often have surprising and unintended effects.

In this course, we will draw on cutting edge research and core theoretical concepts from a variety of fields for students to better understand responses to common forms of incentives and organization designs and their alignment with strategy—such as organizational economics, organizational behavior, and strategy.

Who should take this course? This course should be taken by anyone who expects to have to think about people practices, incentives, and organization design and their consequences to implement organizations’ strategies and their economic, environmental, and societal goals—be it to manage a firm as a manager or when founding one’s own company, advise a firm as a strategy consultant, or redesign and evaluate firms and their business strategies.