This class is geared toward students of all backgrounds (including non-business students) who are interested in learning more about research on human behavior in the workplace or strategic management. **Fall 2023: 1:30PM T/TR** NOT 9:00am!

"Dr. Anna C. Lennard is an Assistant Professor in the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University. Her research examines affect, justice, and decision making biases in organizations. Her work has been published in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Academy of Management Annals, and Oxford OCB Handbook."

Transcript: 

Hi I'm Anna Lennard. I'm a professor here in the management department in the Spears School of Business and I'm going to be talking about the new class that we created for this coming fall. It's management 4650, research studies and people and organizations. It's going to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9:00 A.M.

This isn't actually just a class for business students. This is a class for anyone who might be interested in kind of a deeper delve into human behavior and how it might play out in organizations or at work. So you're around people that you're working with on a daily basis and there's a lot of like underlying psychological principles that can come into those interactions with people or kind of sociological processes, and so this is a class where you'll get a really nice exposure to those different topics.

So I'm the primary instructor on it but each week we're going to have different management professors coming in and talking about their research, different topics, kind of trying to broaden students horizons for what kind of psychological principles and organization can be. So the class is going to be two days a week and so on Tuesdays, they're going to have a new faculty come in who will introduce them to new ideas that will give them research ideas of their own and then on Thursdays we're going to work together to help develop that idea, do little assignments along the way that works them toward a larger project at the end, but it's not kind of supposed to be a lot of work at the end in a frenzy, right? Working on the project in conjunction with all these different faculty. The faculty that you'll meet on Tuesdays could be people who could help you with the research right who could kind of give you more insight into the topics that you end up deciding to focus on.

You don't have to have any kind of idea coming into the class of what you would be interested in doing. The whole idea is that most undergrad students don't actually have a great sense of what management professors do or study, and we're all kind of a mix of psychologists and economists and you know sociologists. So, we study so many different things that it's very exciting I think for students to get the opportunity to see all these different topics that they could even be interested in. So you don't have to pick a topic right away. The idea is just to start getting exposure to some of these things and get an idea of what you might find really interesting.

I think this is a class for students where they've taken kind of a class before that talks about human behavior or just people interacting and they've had a lot of deeper questions of "why does that happen:, right? If you took the site class or even a management class, like I teach them managing people in organizations class here in the Spears School of Business and I have students all the time say "but why do we behave like that in teams?" or "why is that what motivates us?" you know, "why isn't it money?" "why is it this kind of these intrinsic factors?" and we don't have time to talk about that right because we have so much coursework to get through. So this is the time for anyone who gets really interested in why these things are actually happening and we actually have the time to talk about it. It's only going to be 12 students at maximum in the class, and so you've got tons of hands-on contact with all these different management faculty, who could be letter writers for graduate school, who could open up research opportunities if you've ever been interested in going to a doctoral program or a master's program and just kind of get a lot of really valuable resources.

So there's an application just because it is a selective class at this point and so it's just a really quick one page application that you fill out around kind of your own research background, the kind of classes you taken in your major. We want a diversity of students represented in the class, so we can have kind of the most interesting conversation possible.