Action Project

Overview

The Action Project requires you to work as a team to write an instructional article – i.e., your team’s Final Report – focusing on a relevant topic for today’s organizations. Your Final Report will offer a “how to”-guide to a specific target audience addressing an important topic relating to the course content. In the Final Report, you should offer practical advice to people currently working in an organization and grappling with your question; consider how you could use what you have learned in this class to advice your target audience! A Final Report should be, at maximum, 8 pages in the APA 7 style, excluding cover, reference pages, tables and figures, and appendixes.

Assignment Goals and Content

In the Final Report, you and your team should offer practical advice to people currently working in an organization and grappling with the topic of your choosing. Your target audience can mean people in a variety of organizational settings, such as managers in a large corporation, entrepreneurs launching a startup, athletes in a sports team, teachers in a classroom, volunteers in a community organization, doctors in a clinic, members of a fraternity, leaders in a religious institution, etc. The Final Report should include an introduction to your paper’s topic and, as its most important content, a ‘how to’ guide to such organizational actors. We will provide several articles as examples and inspiration for your work

To provide some ideas what a Final Report could focus on, we provide here some rough examples of possible topics (and these are just suggestions – You and your team are invited to be innovative!):

• How can leaders foster collaboration and equality among genders at work?
• What would be an effective diversity training program like? And how could HR managers launch it to make a difference?
• How should project managers lead a team with members working in different cultures and across different time zones?
• How can startup companies motivate employees when resources are tight?
• What are the sources of stress in virtual teams (i.e., in teams with members communicating only via communication technology) and how can employees cope with stress in such teams?
• How do personality factors affect organizational life, such as conflicts, cooperation, competition, and communication? How could managers in healthcare/software development/service sector/etc. manage personality factors for successful organizational outcomes/employees’ wellbeing?
• How to engage in self-presentation and social influence when seeking for an internship/a new job?
• How to successfully deal with power and politics when leading student organizations, sports teams, art clubs, or in some other kinds of organizations?
• How to build and develop a new team in a specific context (e.g., a start-up, inter-professional mental-health team, team to organize a special cultural or sports event)?
• What kinds of process losses emerge in start-up teams/student organization teams/ etc./ and how they can be mitigated through better leadership/collaboration/group design?
• How to exercise leadership in an entry-level position, without formal authority?

In the Final Report, you should back up and illustrate all your arguments and ideas by referring to (1) supporting research and (2) by drawing from relevant organizational examples. The organizational examples can derive from your own experiences and/or your research in publically available material in company websites, magazine or journal articles, etc. Good sources for company stories and working life stories include, for instance, Fast Company, New York Times, Forbes, The Economist, re:Work, Ted Talks, BBC Worklife, etc. Many companies also make interesting material available on their websites! You and your team can also search and analyze social media posts relevant to your topic (e.g., teachers posting ideas on online teaching on Twitter, software programmers sharing experiences on remote work on Facebook).

To develop content and examples to the Final Report, you and your team can also conduct a small study to capture experiences of people at work and in organizations. For instance, you can interview your family members, friends, coworkers, or acquaintances having relevant experiences of your topic, and you can craft practical examples out of these interviews. Or you can collect survey responses by asking individuals or organizations to fill in a survey mapping some constructs (and their connections) relevant to your topic. Doing such a small study is completely optional, and including a study to your Final Report will not necessarily lead to a higher grade. In case you intend to do a small study as a part of the Action Project, your Project Proposal (see below) should include a detailed study plan and, prior to doing any data collection for the study, the plan has to be approved by your GSI. Most importantly, all data gathering should be done by following the federal, state, and University rules and guidelines for preventing the spread of COVID 19.

Project Proposal and Action Planning Guide

Your Project Proposal should be from one to two double-spaced pages (in the APA 7 style) and must include the following information:

• Introducing your team’s topic; the proposal should clearly delineate what your Final Report will be all about. In addition, you should indicate why you chose this question (e.g., why you think it is interesting!).
• Introducing the target audience of your Final Paper. To what audience will you write the ‘how to’ guide? Considering your topic, why is it meaningful and interesting to address this target audience?
• How do you plan to collect relevant organizational examples? Are you planning to use data available on the Internet (if so, what types of data and where are they located)? Are you planning to implement a survey (if so, what will it be like)? Will you interview participants (if so, what questions are you planning to ask)? Prior to doing any data collection for the study, the plan has to be approved by your GSI.
• An Action Planning Guide to facilitate your Team’s planning has been uploaded to site. The Action Planning Guide should be completed as a team and attached as an appendix in your Project Proposal.

Final Report Structure

Your Final Report should be at maximum 8 pages in length in the APA 7 style[1], excluding cover, reference pages, tables and figures, and appendixes. The Final Report should consist of the following main three sections: Introduction, a How-to guide, and Conclusion. The Final Report should also include a title page, references, appendixes (when needed), and tables and figures (when needed). Each of these is explained in detail below.

• Introduction
• An introduction presents your Report’s topic formulated on the basis of the material studied in the course. Underline the topic you are pursuing in the paper when first introducing it!
• You should define the topic clearly and justify why it is important and interesting. Use the literature studied in this course!
• Remember also to indicate and justify your target audience. Considering your topic, what is the audience to whom you will offer practical guidelines and ideas? In what kinds of organizational settings and roles does your target audience work? Why is this a suitable target audience for your Final Report?
• Make sure to define key terms and ideas (e.g., if you are examining “intrinsic motivation,” you need to be specific about what “intrinsic motivation” means).
• Draw on (and cite!) material from the course – you should demonstrate understanding and mastery of the course material.
• You should also shortly indicate the material you are using in the Final Report to illustrate your points (e.g., company cases or examples, a study of your own). If you accessed the relevant material in the Internet, you should mention your main Internet sources here. If you are building on your own experiences in organizations, introduce these organizations here and tell about your connection to the organizations (e.g., in which role did you work in the organization, for how long, etc.). In case you illustrate your points with a small study, you should introduce your sample (e.g., your interview participants, participants who filled in your survey) and also indicate how you collected and analyzed the information (e.g., explain that you interviewed some representatives of the organization/team, describe the interview topics/questions, and explain also how you analyzed the interviews).
• A ‘how to’ guide
  • This section is the core section of your paper where you provide insightful and well-founded ideas relating to your topic. As such, this section should be at least equal length or longer (i.e., cover more pages) than your introduction.
  • You should zero in on a limited set of main takeaways, or process steps, for your target audience facing or wanting to engage your topic. And you should describe and justify the takeaways or process steps on the basis of material studied in the course and illustrate them with actual organizational examples.
  • You should outline insightful and well-founded practical suggestions for how your target audience could approach, cope with, and/or benefit from the topic of your Final Report.
  • Your practical suggestions should aim at leveraging both organizational effectiveness and potential for employees’ well-being at work.
  • You may include tables or figures that help describe your ideas and examples whenever applicable. All tables and figure should follow the APA 7 format.
• Conclusion
  • Here you offer an insightful summary of your main ideas and practical/theoretical contributions.
  • What should the reader learn from your paper?
• References
  • Cite ANY sources of information you utilize in the appropriate places in the text.
  • Include a list of these sources in a reference page.
  • Follow APA 7 format for references.
• Appendices
  • This section will include all supporting documents of your research. Include the following as Appendices (when applicable):
    • Copy of surveys utilized.
    • Interview protocol (questions and procedure).
    • Examples of archival data (website excerpts, articles, mission statements, etc.) to illustrate the kind of archival data you used.
    • Any other miscellaneous, supporting documents that will assist in understanding your data and write-up

---