MBA 610: Leading Organizations and People

For MBA 610 project 3, you’re asked to define the concepts of “organizational culture, climate, and ethical decisions and practices.” As noted in the instructions for your deliverable, you can use the sources mentioned in your classroom to find these definitions. You can also find additional information about these concepts by using UMGC Library databases such as Gale eBooks and SAGE Knowledge: SAGE Reference eBook Collection to search for:

Some additional readings that might be of use/interest include, for example:

• What is the difference between organizational culture and organizational climate? A native's point of view on a decade of paradigm wars
• Organizational culture and climate
• The Oxford handbook of organizational climate and culture
• Ethical responsibilities of business
• The SAGE encyclopedia of business ethics and society

You are also asked to discuss the current organizational culture and climate of your own organization or an organization that your instructor has approved.

Keep in mind that there may not be any articles from scholarly journals that directly discuss your chosen organization’s culture, climate, and/or ethics; rather, it’s very possible that you’ll need to use a variety of sources in order to be able to provide an informed commentary about what it’s like to work at your organization.

Some UMGC Library resources that you could use include:

• business databases, such as Business Source Ultimate and ABI/INFORM Collection. You can run searches such as:
  • [company name] AND ("company climate" OR "company culture" OR "company environment" OR "corporate climate" OR "corporate culture" OR "corporate environment" OR "job climate" OR "job culture" OR "job environment" OR "organizational climate" OR "organizational culture" OR "organizational environment" OR "work climate" OR "work culture" OR "work environment" OR "work* condition*" OR ethic*)
  • [company name] AND ("employee relations" OR "labor relations" OR "labor union*")
  • [company name] AND (employee* OR work* OR staff* OR personnel)
• newspaper databases, such as News & Newspapers (ProQuest), which includes articles from major U.S. newspapers, such as the Baltimore Sun, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. You can run the same searches as suggested above.

In addition to these UMGC Library resources, you might also want to take a look at resources that are freely available online, such as:

• Glassdoor.com, a website that contains anonymous reviews of companies written by current and former employees. (Keep in mind, of course, that such reviews are very likely to be biased. Still, though, employee reviews may be useful for getting a sense of what type of concerns a company’s employees have -- and it may be particularly telling if many employees raise the same concern(s).)
• your company’s own website. Take a look, for example, at whether your company’s website provides any information for prospective employees. What types of information is conveyed, either directly or indirectly? What type of impression does your company’s website create about the company? Does the website mention any particular benefits that employees derive from working at the company? Does the website mention that the company values ethics? What do the company's policies, mission statement, and/or vision statement indicate about what the company values?

In addition to those freely available resources, you might also want to take a look at resources only available to company employees, such as:

• postings on a company intranet
• recordings of company meetings
• results of employee satisfaction/engagement surveys

You should use proprietary company resources only sparingly as resources for your assignment, and only if it wouldn’t violate any company policy for you to mention such sources.

Note that any company resources that aren’t available to non-employees should be handled as personal communications for citation purposes, as discussed at APA 7th edition citation examples: Interviews, e-mail messages, and other personal communications.

If you need further assistance with finding information for project 3, please Ask a Librarian.

If you have questions about the requirements for project 3, please contact your instructor.