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Management 454
Work Teams in Organizations
Tuesday, 4:00 - 6:30, 6:30 – 8:00 PM, Business Complex, Room 204
Fall 2008
Professor:
Michael R. Manning
Business Complex 321
505-646-2532
mmanning@nmsu.edu
Course Description and Overview:
This course is designed to increase your knowledge about groups as well as increase your ability
to be a member of a working unit and to manage these work teams. The primary emphasis will
be placed on learning and understanding work team dynamics by actively being a member of an
ongoing class group, specifically designed to explore group dynamics while being engaged in a
real task.
Learning Objectives:
The goal of this course is to help you be able to more fully utilize the resources of any group or
organization with which you are working. Learning objectives include:
to learn how to recognize and understand the subtleties of group processes
to learn how to build and maintain a team
to learn skills of effective group members (problem solving and decision making,
communication, managing conflict, developing appropriate norms, leading and
influencing others, etc.)
Course Activities and Evaluation:
The course will demand active involvement by all participants. Class sessions will not focus
solely on textbook facts, but will comprise numerous activities and experiences that cannot be
replicated without being in attendance. The beginning assumption regarding learning in this
course is: to learn about teams and work groups requires that one be a member of an ongoing
group in which course concepts and ideas exist and can be applied. The class exercises
performed in these learning teams will enable us to: (1) see and experience what we read in our
texts and course handouts about work groups, and (2) to use the learning groups as a laboratory
