MG439      Half Unit
Organisational Behaviour for Master's in Management

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This course is about the people side of business. Although skills in finance, accounting, marketing and operations are crucial for organisational success, the ability to manage and understand an organisation, its groups, and its individuals is equally crucial. Technical skills may help you land a job, but people skills are likely to determine whether or not you keep it, and how much you can accomplish in your career.
In this course, we will explore a variety of perspectives and theories that explain the dynamics of individual, interpersonal, group, and organisational processes. Learning about these ideas will help you develop and apply insights about human behaviour in organisational settings. The course material will be useful in planning careers, managing relationships with other people, making complex decisions, designing jobs, becoming a leader, and making sense of today’s – and tomorrow’s – corporate world. This course will also help you understand some of the challenges involved in both managing and being managed. Ultimately, the tools and skills developed in this course should equip you to become more effective contributors to the organisations that you join. Much of our learning in this course will be through case studies, exercises, and class discussions.

30 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

The format of the course is highly participatory and interactive and will involve a combination of case studies, interactive exercises, discussions and readings. Students are expected to attend course sessions and to participate actively in the discussions. Students’ learning in this course is directly related to their willingness to expose their ideas and conclusions to the critical judgement of the class, and to their efforts to build on and evaluate the comments of classmates.

Full preparation for each session is essential. Students are to complete readings prior to the session for which they are assigned.

In its Ethics Code, LSE upholds a commitment to intellectual freedom. This means we will protect the freedom of expression of our students and staff and the right to engage in healthy debate in the classroom.

Students will be expected to produce 1 project in the WT.

The formative assignment will allow students to demonstrate their learning and receive in-depth feedback in preparation for a summative assessment. Details will be provided during the teaching term

There is no set text for this course. The following are examples of articles that will be assigned: Harvard Business School case studies, academic journal articles, Harvard Business Review articles. Students will be given electronic access to cases, texts and articles during the teaching term. 

Continuous assessment (30%)

Short answer questions (30%)

Project (40%)

For detailed assessment information, including all deadlines and timings, please see the relevant course Moodle page. Assessment timings will be available at the start of each term.