Chicago Booth logo

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Skip navigation
AboutContactVisitChicago Booth Home
  List of Concentrations

Managerial and Organizational Behavior

Managerial and Organizational Behavior

Managerial and Organization Behavior helps you lead by providing you with the technical and functional skills needed to navigate the challenges presented by a complex organization. You will focus on learning how people use information and make decisions, as well as how they develop and use social capital to make things happen.

At Chicago Booth, we go beyond just teaching you how to come up with a business solution. We focus on creating an awareness of the many considerations that need to be taken into account when implementing an idea. The Chicago approach combines theory and research from cognitive and social psychology, sociology, economics, and other related fields to study human behavior as it applies to a range of managerial contexts. You will examine such topics as the use of incentives; problem solving by individuals, groups and organizations; negotiations; how to build more effective working relationships; teamwork and leadership.

 

COCURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
You'll have the chance to explore operations outside the classroom in numerous ways that will also allow you to build new skills, relationships and networks. These include:

Community Activities

Management Conference

For over 55 years, Management Conference has featured faculty, business leaders and alumni who examine issues faced everyday in the workplace and apply the very best in conceptual knowledge, academic theory and practical solutions. Last year over 1000 people attended. Read about the 2008 conference.

 





 

COURSE SAMPLING
You’ll have the option of taking courses that address your individual career choices. Samples include:

Network Structures of Effective Management

Success requires two things: being technically competent and being able to effectively manage social relationships. This course combines sociology and economics to introduce general principles of management with an emphasis on how the management of relationships has real and hard outcomes for you as someone attempting to create value and advance your career. The goal is to provide you with a set of tools that you can use immediately and effectively. The material is approached from the perspective of you as an entrepreneurial manager/leader trying to get things done. This focuses the discussion on the central task of creating value through coordination: coordinating your personal contacts to diverse groups in an organization, coordinating employees within and between the functional groups in an organization, and coordinating business activities across diverse markets. Principles of social organization indicate how best to coordinate those interests to create value. This course is an introduction to those principles and their application.

Managerial Decision Making

In some business situations, we can make decisions analytically and "optimally." But more often than not, we do not have the time or the information to engage in analytical decision-making, and we have to rely on our intuition and experiences to resolve important decisions. This course teaches you how to make decisions in both types of situations. With respect to the first type of situation, I will share with you analytical tools and teach you how to use them to reach optimal solutions. With respect to the second type of situation, I will help you discover errors "normal people" often commit when they make decisions intuitively, and teach you how to overcome these errors and thereby become "less normal," namely, smarter than the average person. Many topics we will cover are based on the Nobel Prize-winning research on behavioral decision theory; it is the foundation of behavioral economics, behavioral marketing, and behavioral finance.

Strategies and Processes of Negotiation

Managerial success requires agreement and collaboration with other people. The course is designed to be relevant to the broad spectrum of negotiation problems that are faced by managers, and to teach you the skills necessary to discover and implement optimal solutions to these problems. These skills include an understanding of the problem at hand, the other parties involved, the common biases in the judgments and decisions of negotiators, and the effective tactics of social influence.

FACULTY SAMPLING
You’ll study with professors who conduct groundbreaking research, collaborate with the entrepreneurial and private equity communities, and bring their own entrepreneurial experiences into the classroom.

Image for Eugene M. Caruso Eugene M. Caruso, studies social judgment, group decision-making and negotiation, egocentrism, perspective-taking, and ethics. His published work includes "The Costs and Benefits of Undoing Egocentric Responsibility Assessments in Groups" and "When Perspective Taking Increases Taking: Reactive Egoism in Social Interaction," both written with N. Epley and M. H. Bazerman and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Image for Christopher K. Hsee Christopher K. Hsee, conducts research on the interplay between psychology and economics, happiness, marketing, and cross-cultural psychology. He serves or has served on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including the Journal of Marketing Research,Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Behavior Decision Making, and Management and Organization Review.
Image for Nicholas Epley Nicholas Epley, conducts research on the experimental study of social cognition, perspective taking, and intuitive human judgment. His research has appeared in more than two dozen journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, and the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. His research also has been featured by the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Wired, and National Public Radio, among many others, and has been funded by the National Science Foundation. Image for Tanya Menon Tanya Menon, studies how national culture affects people's everyday assumptions and their patterns of decision making. She also studies how organizational cultures affect learning. This research examines how managers respond to new ideas, and particularly why they sometimes value knowledge from insiders, competitors, and consultants differently.
Image for Ayelet Fishbach Ayelet Fishbach, studies social psychology, with specific emphasis on motivation, emotion, and decision making. She is the recipient of several international awards, including the Society of Experimental Social Psychology's Best Dissertation Award and the Fulbright Educational Foundation Award. Image for Richard H. Thaler Richard H. Thaler, studies behavioral economics and finance as well as the psychology of decision-making which lies in the gap between economics and psychology. His latest book, Nudge, has found favor is influencing political thinkers in both the United States and England.
Image for Reid Hastie Reid Hastie, is best known for his research on legal decision-marking and on social memory and judgment processes. He has written a textbook, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making, in collaboration with Robyn Dawes of Carnegie Mellon University. Image for Bernd Wittenbrink Bernd Wittenbrink, is interested in the psychology of person perception and social judgment, specifically the impact that stereotypes and group attitudes may have on people's decisions and behaviors. His research has been published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and Social Cognition. His book on recent developments in attitude measurement, Implicit Measures of Attitudes, coauthored with N. Schwarz, is published by Guilford Press.
dot


Last Updated 8/5/10