MCA-132
Management Principles and Organizational Behavior
How organisations are run and how people behave inside them — the management functions, leadership, personality and motivation, groups, culture and change.
- Semester
- Semester 2
- Credits
- 4
- Scheme
- 3 lectures + 1 tutorial a week
- Contact hours
- 45 across four units
- Category
- Open Elective - I
What the paper is
Management Principles and Organizational Behaviour is two subjects with a clean join in the middle. The first two units are classical management — planning, organising, staffing, directing, controlling, delegation and leadership. The last two are organisational behaviour — personality, perception, attitudes, motivation, groups, culture, conflict and change.
Unit III is the largest in the paper at thirteen hours and the densest: MBTI and the Big Five, learning theories, perception, values and attitudes, transactional analysis and the Johari window, four theories of motivation, and group dynamics. It is best approached as a set of named models rather than as continuous prose.
It is an open elective taken alongside technical papers, and it is examined descriptively, with case studies in Unit IV. Answers that name the model and then apply it to the case score considerably better than answers that only describe.
What to concentrate on
- The motivation theories — Maslow, Herzberg, McClelland, Ouchi — are the most reliably examined block. Learn them as a set you can compare, because the question is usually comparative.
- Transactional analysis and the Johari window are compact, visual and frequently asked. Be able to draw both and give an example of each ego state and quadrant.
- For Unit IV, Lewin's force field analysis and the sources of resistance to change are the recurring question. Schein's three levels of culture is the other; both are short answers with a diagram.
Syllabus, unit by unit
Summarised from the approved scheme. Hours are the contact hours the scheme allots, which is a fair guide to where the marks sit.
Unit I · Management, planning and organising
10 hours- Meaning and nature of management, management as a process, management versus administration, managerial functions
- Coordination and its relation to cooperation, the role of managers, levels of management, managerial skills
- Planning and forecasting: types, levels and range of planning, the process, derivative plans, barriers, MBO, forecasting techniques
- Decision making: types of decision, the process, rationality and bounded rationality, techniques
- Organising: steps, formal and informal organisation, organisational structure, span of control, scalar chain, line and staff organisation
Unit II · Delegation, control and leadership
10 hours- Authority, power and organisational politics; elements and principles of delegation
- Decentralisation and its difference from delegation
- Staffing and directing; supervision
- Controlling: process and techniques, and its relation to planning
- Leadership: qualities, styles and skills; behavioural and contingency perspectives, path-goal theory
- Transactional, transformational and charismatic leadership; trait theory
Unit III · Organisational behaviour
13 hours- Historical background and emerging aspects of OB, levels of analysis
- Personality: MBTI and the Big Five, theories of personality and their implications for managers
- Learning: classical and operant conditioning, social learning, reinforcement theory and schedules
- Perception: influencing factors, the perception process, perceptual errors and distortions
- Values and attitudes: types of value, terminal and instrumental values, attitude formation, job satisfaction, job involvement, organisational commitment
- Interpersonal relations: transactional analysis, ego states and types of transaction, the Johari window
- Motivation: Herzberg's two-factor theory, McClelland's theory of needs, Maslow's hierarchy, Ouchi's theory, job enrichment and enlargement
- Group dynamics and communication: types of group, managing diverse groups, stages of group development, work teams, communication process and barriers
Unit IV · Culture, conflict, change and stress
12 hours- Organisational climate: significance and influencing factors
- Organisational culture: elements, managing culture, Schein's three levels
- Conflict and negotiation: types of conflict, attitudes towards conflict, hidden conflicts, sources and strategies, integrative and distributive bargaining
- Management of organisational change: forces of change, planned change, Lewin's force field analysis, resistance to change and overcoming it
- Work stress: types, personal, organisational and environmental causes, consequences, individual and organisational coping strategies
- Case studies
How it is examined
- Question 1 is compulsory, covers the whole syllabus, and is made of objective or short-answer questions. It carries 12 marks.
- The rest of the paper is four units matching the four above. Each unit sets two questions and you attempt one, so there are four more answers at 12 marks each.
- Examiners are asked to map every question to a course outcome using Bloom's taxonomy, which is why questions are phrased as “apply”, “analyse” or “evaluate” rather than only “explain”.
The pass mark is 40 out of 100 in every paper.
Learning objectives
- Understanding management and behavioural processes in the business environment
- Identifying human interactions in an organisation at various levels
- The factors driving human interactions
- Applying what is learnt to interpersonal interactions to attain organisational goals
Assumed beforehand
- High analytical, interpersonal, observational and communication skills
Books it is taught from
- TB1T. N. Chhabra, “Management Process and Organizational Behaviour”, Sun India Publication, 3rd edition, 2017
- TB2S. P. Robbins, T. A. Judge and N. Vohra, “Organizational Behaviour”, Pearson, 18th edition, 2019
- TB3C. B. Gupta, “A Textbook of Organizational Behaviour”, S. Chand Publishing, 2014
Notes for MCA-132
Lecture notes, question papers and assignments filed against MCA-132 are in the library. Everything there has been checked by a moderator before it appears, and an account is free — new ones are approved by hand, which is what keeps the shelf clean.